Horas

1. Hans Kelsen
INTRODUCTION
Clemens Jabloner
The introduction and selections from Kelsen were translated by Belinda Cooper and Stephan Hemetsberger.
Hans Kelsen was born on 11 October 1881 into a modest bourgeois family in Prague. The family soon moved to Vienna, where Kelsen passed his Gymnasium exams in 1900. The economist Ludwig von Mises was among his classmates and friends. Kelsenstudied law and earned a doctorate in 1906 with a quite unusual work, “Dante Alighieri's Theory of the State” [Die Staatslehre des Dante Alighieri]. In 1908, Kelsen had the opportunity to study for a time in Heidelberg with Georg Jellinek, at the time the leading authority on the general theory of the state. In 1911, Kelsen published his Habilitationsschrift, titled Main Problems in State Law Theor yDeveloped from the Theor y of the Normative Proposition [Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre entwickelt aus der Lehre vom Rechtssatze]. Kelsen became a university teacher in 1911 and held a chair in Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1930. He took an active part in developing the Austrian federal constitution of 1 October 1920, and is rightly consideredits creator. In addition to his work as a university professor, which led to the establishment of a “Vienna school of legal theory” whose influence extended far beyond Austria's borders, Kelsen served until 1929 as a member of the Austrian Constitutional Court; establishing the court's theoretical and constitutional basis remained at the center of Kelsen's commitment.
Austria's worsening domesticpolitical situation led to Kelsen losing his

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position as constitutional court judge. In 1929 Kelsen accepted a chair at the University of Cologne, which he lost in 1933 because of his Jewish origins. Kelsen moved to Geneva and until 1940 worked at the University Institute of Advanced International Studies [Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales] and also occasionally atthe University of Prague. In 1940, he left Europe for good and emigrated to the United States. He taught—with great difficulty[1]—first at Harvard Law School, and later in the political science department of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1945 Kelsen accepted a professorship at Berkeley. Apart from visits to Vienna and some official honors, Kelsen never returned to his home country.He died on 19 April 1973 in Berkeley.
I
At the core of Kelsen's extensive work lies his foundation and development of the Pure Theory of Law. His thesis of 1911 (Main Problems) was an initial, powerful attempt to solve the problems of the theory of the state through an exclusively legal methodology. Remaining true to his basic scholarly interests, Kelsen repeatedly turned to outlining acomplete account of his theory. This includes the Main Problems, the General Theor y of the State[Allgemeine Staatslehre, 1925], the first edition of the Pure Theor y of Law [Reine Rechtslehre, 1934], the General Theor y of Law and State (written in English, 1945), the second edition of the Pure Theory of Law (1960), and the posthumous General Theor y of Norms [Allgemeine Theorie der Normen, 1979].
Whatare the essential elements of the Pure Theory of Law?[2]
1. The Pure Theory of Law is a theory about norms. Its object—positive law—is an order of “ought” and not of “is,” of legal norms, not social facts. Only this normative approach does justice to the immanent meaning of law, which is its claim to validity. Thus, the Pure Theory of Law stands in opposition to a sociological jurisprudencethat denies the possibility of a normative, doctrinal jurisprudence.[3]
2. The Pure Theory of Law is a positivist theory. Legal norms are the meaning of human acts of will. This discards all variants of natural law, whether they construe law as a product of a supernatural will or as a construction of reason. The task of doctrinal jurisprudence is in essence to ascertain as precisely as...