LEGAL FICTIONS FOR ADMINISTRATIVE COURTS

Abstract

Goal. The paper reveals features of applying administrative procedural legal fictions in order to avoid abuse of the right and evasion of the law when exercising procedural discretion. Methods. For achievement of research purposes, the author uses special legal methods of scientific knowledge: formal-logical, system-functional, formal-logical, comparative-legal. Results. Historiography of the legal fictions use has been dealt with. Essence of fictions has been highlighted in the paper as legal anomalies. The use of legal fictions in the administrative process has been detailed, taking into account the Grundnorm theory. The connection between legal fictions and legal regulations has been revealed. The legal fiction has been described as a reinterpretation of the facts of an event in order to make these facts compatible with the rule, and at the same time allowing to get the correct result. This is a type of legal fiction-reinterpreting X (or class X) as Y in order to avoid an “inconvenient”, unreliable, false, etc. result for the purposes of the law. As a rule, it is recognized that X is not Y. That is, the court considers the creation of a fiction as a legitimate action within the framework of the judicial process; the activity that could be performed without concealment as a discretely true category. Case law on the application of legal fictions has been described. It has been advised to use legal fictions when considering and resolving disputes, provided that there are false or clearly erroneous judgments in the provisions of existing applicable legal rules. As a consequence, time and resource costs for clarifying the facts of the case and over-motivating the judgment are minimized. Conclusions. Firstly, features of legal fictions have been highlighted, in particular, for achieving the goals and objectives of administrative proceedings. Secondly, the classification of arguments, methods and approaches to the application of such atypical regulators in the administrative process has been proposed by the “meta” degree: 1) on the fundamental metric – internal, or zero-order arguments; 2) at the derivative definitive level – by defining functional, structural and relative concepts.