Wojciech Rzepiński

The chapter explores how the phrase “legal practice” is used in the judicial practice of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The considerations in the main part of the chapter are of the theoretical nature. Firstly, the author indicates two main roles that the concept of practice plays in the reasoning of its users: (1) legal practice as activities of professionals, and (2) legal practice as a process of applying the law. Secondly, the author proposes four dimensions of legal practice that—in his view— are manifested in the use of the concept in the examined material: (1) we are always talking about “someone’s legal practice”; (2) practices are composed of actions for which we can propose variegated characteristics; (3) practices are located in different spaces: in physical ones (e.g., in a specific territory), but also in abstract spaces (e.g., within a specific legal system); and (4) the temporal dimension of legal practice was distinguished to accentuate that we always “grasp” the practice at a specific point in time.

The aim of this paper is to show that the meaning and significance of legal evidence is being constituted throughout the course of a singular instance of legal proceedings. This is to be achieved by describing what legal agents _do_ while appealing to different propositions of fact and inferring from them throughout the course of legal proceedings. The authors claim that the process of applying the law is ultimately rooted in the inferential discursive practices of exchanging reasons on the part of the participants of legal proceedings. Therefore, they set forth a model of legal proceedings that consists of an interplay between three types of reasons, which are exchanged by the participants of legal proceedings: i.e. legal reasons, epistemic reasons and stake reasons. To illustrate this interplay, the authors deploy a metaphor of law as a game, and provide a description of legal proceedings as a particular instance of playing a game of law. The conclusion is that the legal concept of evidence is (at least in part) constituted by the role that evidence plays in affecting which reasons for action the participants to legal proceedings choose to act on. The other final assumption of this paper is metatheoretical: authors want to show that when analyzing what legal evidence is, one should begin from the perspective of a singular instance of legal proceedings, rather than from the perspective of law in general.