Why does something need to be a fiction in law or the courts?
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A legal fiction may be a hypothetical person created for the purpose of applying a test or standard. For example, there is a test in tort law of how a “reasonable person” would have acted. This person is a legal fiction. Nobody in real life acts in a perfectly rational and prudent way at all times. There is no such thing as a person who you could call to the witness stand to testify as a reasonable person. Instead, the parties debate what this hypothetical person might have done, based on evidence and testimony from real people.
Similarly, in patent law, the inventiveness of a patent might be considered from the perspective of a person of ordinary skill in the art. This is a fictional and impossible person who knows literally all of the prior art in the world regardless of what language it’s in or what university library has the only copy of it locked away in storage, and has all the base technical knowledge to combine it all in routine ways, but has no creativity at all. The parties have to bring evidence of prior art and whether this hypothetical person would have combined it in a particular way. This person only exists to concretize the legal test for inventiveness.
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