Legal Dictionary of Pakistan

Persona ficta

[Latin "false mask"] Hist. A fictional person, such as a corporation. "But units other than individual men can be thought of as capable of acts, or of rights and liabilities: such are Corporations and even Hereditates lacentes. Accordingly the way is clear to apply the name of person to these also. The mediaeval lawyers did so, but as they regarded Corporations as endowed with personality by a sort of creative act of the State, and received from the Roman lawyers the conception of the hereditas iacens as representing the persona of the deceased rather than as itself being a person, they called these things Personae Fictae, an expression not used by the Romans." W.W. Buckland, Elementary Principles of the Roman Private Law 16 (1912).