Legal Fictions

Many judges faced with the task of rendering difficult decisions have a habit of pretending things that they know to be false. In so doing they employ legal fiction. Generally, a legal fiction is a false assumption of fact made by a court as the basis for resolving a legal issue. One of its purposes is to reconcile a specific legal result with an established legal rule. Legal fictions are thought to provide a mechanism for preserving the rule while ensuring a just outcome. By feigning the facts, the rule is said to remain intact. Historically, the fiction has achieved a certain duality. It is thought to be a humiliation to legal reasoning while, at the same time, indispensable to justice.;This study of legal fictions is an attempt to answer plaguing questions in the debate about an old judicial practice. To what extent are legal fictions necessary? What is their proper function? What are the dangers associated with their use? The answer to these questions is gleaned from four separate investigations of the fiction, each taken from a different perspective. The first is an overview of the historical debate that has been generated by the use of legal fictions. It provides an essential distinction between the judicial device known as a legal fiction and other so-called fictions that form the infrastructure of our legal system. The second investigation provides a contemporary account of legal fictions through a critical examination of Fuller\u27s study of them. This investigation reveals certain shortcomings in Fuller\u27s theoretical account. Consequently, in the third investigation, a contemporary case study is provided. The development of a particular legal fiction is traced from its ancient origins in Roman law to its present use in the Canadian courts in an attempt to understand how the fiction actually operates in practice. In the final investigation, a philosophical examination of the background conditions underlying the use of legal fictions illustrates how reasoning through the device of fiction differs from usual methods of judicial reasoning. This is achieved by contemplating nonfiction in the law on Searle\u27s model of institutional facts

A Predictive Approach to On-line Time Warping of Motion

The paper presents a novel approach to real-time temporal alignment of motion sequences, called On-line Predictive Warping (OPW) and considers potential uses in interactive applications. The approach develops on the methods of aligning motions based on least cost, used in dynamic time warping (DTW), with the short term predictions of smoothing algorithms, in an iterative step through approach. The approach allows a recorded motion sequence to be warped to align it with a users motion as it is being captured. The paper demonstrates the potential feasibility of the approach to support applications in MR and VR, allowing virtual characters to perform and interact with users and live actors in a variety of rehearsal, training, visualisation and performance scenarios

The economic cost of weeds in dryland cotton production systems of Australia

Economic losses and costs associated with weeds in dryland cotton production are important, both for growers and for industry bodies when making decisions about research priorities and research and development funding. A survey was conducted to provide information on weed types, control strategies and estimated costs to growers. We used information from the survey to estimate conventional financial losses due to weeds, and as a basis for evaluating aggregate economic (society) impacts. An economic surplus model was used to estimate the aggregate societal impact of weeds for three production regions in north-eastern Australia. The annual economic costs associated with weeds were estimated to be $41 million, and the on-farm financial costs were$25 million. While these are past (sunk) costs, and based on a total removal of weeds, the approach outlined here can be used to begin evaluating likely future returns from technologies or management improvements for different agricultural problems.Weeds, Dryland Cotton, and Economics, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Brane inflation with dark reheating

In brane world scenarios inflationary vacuum energy may escape into the higher dimensional bulk leaving behind a dark radiation effect on the brane. The paper analyses the damping of an inflaton by massless bulk scalar radiation and the production of dark radiation in a Randall-Sundrum type of model.Comment: 4 pages, ReVTe