What is a Fiction of Law? (Supreme Court)
Posted on: April 5, 2009 by: admin
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A corporation, while by fiction of law recognized for some purposes as a person and for purposes of jurisdiction as a citizen, is not endowed with the inalienable rights of a natural person, but it is an artificial person, created and existing only for the convenient transaction of business. Northern Securities Company V. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 48 L. Ed. 679, 24 S.Ct. 436 (1904).
Defendants insist that it is immaterial that a combination can be discovered by going behind the fiction that the Securities Company is a private person with an existence separate and apart from its members, because, as they say, the law will not allow that fiction to be disregarded or contradicted will not allow the acts of the corporate entity to be treated as the acts of the natural persons who compose it. The defendants thus seek to defeat the ends of the law by a fiction invented to promote them. This proposition cannot be sustained. People v. North River Sugar Rfg. Co., 121 N.Y. 582, 615. Id.
Fictions of law, invented to promote justice, can never be invoked to accomplish its defeat. “In fictione juris semper aequitas existit.” Mostyn v. Fabriges, Cowper, 177; Morris v. Pugh, 3 Burr. 1243; Morawetz, 1, 227; Taylor on Corporations, 50; Clark and Marshall on Private Corporations, 17, 22; State v. Standard Oil Co., 49 Ohio St. 137; Ford v. Milk Shippers, supra, and other cases cited (supra) . Id.
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