ABSTRACT
There are several aspects of law that seem to be connected, but it is not entirely clear why and how. For one, law is an artifact; it is deliberately created by humans to serve some purposes. Furthermore, the law is created and modified by saying things; the law is one of those domains, like fiction, in which the saying so makes it so. But very much unlike fiction, law is an authoritative institution, and its authority is spacio-temporal, tied to location and relative to time. The main purpose of this chapter is to show how various aspects of law and fiction are closely related, and how they exhibit features that are generally shared by expressive artifacts. Both law and fiction belong to a type of intangible artifacts, created by communicative means, giving rise to closed prefixed contexts in which truths in that context are constituted by performative speech acts. The law, however, is very much unlike fiction in that it is essentially authoritative. I conclude by showing how law’s spacio-temporal aspect, which it does not share with most other expressive artifacts, derives from its authoritative nature.
