Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Associate Professor of the Department of Private Law Tehran,tehran, Iran
Abstract
Should the two critical sections of law, i.e., the statutes and the court's decision, correspond to reality? Explicit clarity and determinacy in the law are not always desirable, and where legislators know that they cannot enact a just law, they should draft their general rule with ambiguity and vagueness so that judges can at least reach a fair judgment in each specific case. However, if the law has unequivocally set forth an unjust rule, the way for judges to achieve fairness is by applying judicial/legal fictions; not recognizing the case’s matter of fact with the intent of not applying its matter of law. The stipulation as regard fairness, however, is that these judicial fictions should be used to restore the lost justice in the enacted law, not to impose additional injustice on citizens. The criteria for this discernment are the judgment of the parties to the dispute, of judges of higher courts, and of common sense.
Aristotelian ethics holds that justice is a mean theory that leads to courage, chastity, and wisdom. This means that excess and deficiency in these three virtues can result in injustice, and maintaining moderation is therefore always commendable. Now, we must ask what should be done if the law, in its extreme pursuit of clarity and truth, reaches an unbearable threshold. From the extreme precision in the implementation of strict religious rulings to the precise discovery of truth by any means by the court. Should the law ratify strict religious rulings in the name of protecting the family? And if someone committed debauchery in a foreign country and there was no evidence except a video taken by the person himself, should the Islamic judge watch the video to complete the evidence for his judicial verdict on the sharia punishment? If this is the correct path, then where should the law show leniency and avoid rigidity, fanaticism, and naivety? Blessed is the time when the law abandons all this clarity and honesty, becomes acquainted with some myth, fiction, and falsehood, and is assured that nothing terrible will ever happen.
Specifically, this article proposes two types of literary falsehoods that the law can use to avoid causing discord: ambiguity and metaphor. When we speak of the law, we always refer to its two perennial branches: legislation and adjudication. We now say that legislators can use the falsehood of "ambiguity" in their legislation, and judges can use the falsehood of "metaphor" in their adjudications, thereby revitalizing the law that is breaking from excessive dryness.
However, ambiguity is a falsehood achieved by deliberately creating vagueness in speech. Legislators can write laws with ambiguity where the strict enforcement of Sharia rulings is evidently harsh and unjust. Contrary to what has been said, clarity and transparency in law are not always good, and where social, philosophical, cultural, and economic discussions about a subject are still ongoing and the legislator finds themselves compelled to write a law, it should be written as ambiguously as possible and leave the judges with the flexibility to interpret it appropriately so that this ambiguity ultimately benefits the human groups in dialogue.
But if legislators have written a harsh and explicit law out of imprudence, judges can resort to their own mythical falsehoods to perhaps alleviate the bitterness of the law: judicial metaphors and fictions, or mythical and legal fictions created by judges to intervene in the matter of fact of a case they are dealing with, and delay the implementation of a bad legal text that does not allow for any interpretation. Legal fictions of the adjudicative type are the shadow of legal fictions of the legislative type that have been cast from the position of legislation onto the platform of adjudication. However, the legal fiction is a substantive rule, unlike the irrebuttable presumption which is proof of the claim. Nevertheless, the adjudicative fictions in the context of this article are proofs of the claim and can be compared with irrebuttable presumptions, with the difference being that the judge creates them, not the statute.
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