1 Adam Dyrda Ä The Real Ratio Legis and Where to Find It A Few Pragmatic Considerations [DRAFT – please do not cite without permission!] Abstract The term “ratio legis” is an important term of legal practice. Thus, reflection over the general conceptual content of “ratio legis” may be a window through which practitioners could see the relevance of philosophizing about terms and arguments applied generally in legal practice. However, the primary question with regard to “ratio legis” is not conceptual, but existential: Is there any real ratio legis that can be discovered and described? The positive answer opens the door for further investigation over the term’s real conceptual content. I will argue, however, that the answer to this question cannot be positive and every qualification of something as the “law’s reason” is a creative activity. If it is so, then every instance of such a labelling (in which one says “The ratio legis of this legislative act is X”) is in need of further justification. The example of “ratio legis” shows that legal theorizing is profoundly a normative study of how we should, rather than of how we do, use legal terms (concepts). 1. When practitioners should think about concepts and why Legal practitioners have a strong proclivity to discriminate between practical legal matters and philosophical, unpractical speculation about law that is irrelevant to the resolution of the case at hand. There is a general intuition that law need not be infused with philosophical speculation, and even legal-theoretical reflections, not to mention ordinary court discourse, should be as “aphilosophical” as possible. 1 Although it is, I think, obvious for any legal philosopher (or just any philosopher) that we cannot dispense with substantial philosophical assumptions while talking about any object (whether we talk about abstract objects like Ä Jagiellonian University, Department of Legal Theory, e-mail: adam.dyrda@uj.edu.pl. This chapter was written as a result of a research project no 2016/21/D/HS5/03839, financed by Polish National Science Centre. 1 See Wróblewski 1996.