fiction of law

The series has some important things to say about race in America, particularly in explaining how society concocted expedient notions about race that have no backing in genetics or biology - what Mark Twain described as a "a fiction of law and custom."

In Dicey's words it meant that 'whenever men act in concert for a common purpose they tend to create a body, which from no fiction of law but from the very nature of things, differs from the individuals of whom it is constituted.'