I couldn’t resist the double entendre while I sat in class the other day, and knew immediately that I wanted to create a challenge based around the concept of “a legal fiction.” There are two kinds of legal fictions—

(1) fiction written about situations involving the law
(2) a legal concept used by courts as a “nicety” to get around illogical situations that are required by law but don’t hold water logically.

I want you to write a story, a la the novel Joan and Peter (1918) by H. G. Wells, which is a legal fiction about a legal fiction.

Feel free to use Wikipedia as a source of inspiration for different types of legal fictions out there. For instance, one of my favorite legal fictions is that corporations are people, which leads us to some awkward situations like the recent rules that corporations have a free speech right to spend freely in political campaigns—will they be able to vote next?

The topic is yours to decide!