Hans Kelsen

Hans Kelsen
Bust of Hans Kelsen in the University of Vienna.
Born	(1881-10-11)October 11, 1881 Prague, Austria-Hungary
Died	April 19, 1973(1973-04-19) (aged 91) Berkeley, California
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Legal positivism
Notable ideas	Pure Theory of Law

Hans Kelsen (German: [ˈkɛlsən]; October 11, 1881 – April 19, 1973) was a jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He is regarded as one of the most important legal scholars of the 20th century.

Biography

Kelsen was born in Prague into a middle-class, German-speaking, Jewish family. His father, Adolf Kelsen, was from Galicia, and his mother, Auguste Löwy, was from Bohemia. Hans was their first child; there would be two younger brothers and a sister. The family moved to Vienna in 1884, when Hans was three years old. After graduating from the Akademisches Gymnasium, Kelsen studied law at the University of Vienna, taking his doctorate in law (Dr iuris) on 18 May 1906 and his habilitation on 9 March 1911. Twice in his life, Kelsen converted to separate religious denominations. At the time of his dissertation on Dante and Catholicism, Kelsen was baptised as a Roman Catholic on 10 June 1905. On 25 May 1912 he married Margarete Bondi, the two having converted a few days earlier to Lutheranism of the Augsburg Confession; they would have two daughters.

Hans Kelsen And His Years in Austria Up To 1930

Kelsen's dissertation on Dante's theory of the state in 1905 became his first book on political theory. In this book Kelsen made explicit his preference for the reading of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy as largely based in political allegory. The study makes a rigorous examination of the "two swords doctrine" of Pope Gelasius I, along with Dante's distinct sentiments in the Roman Catholic debates between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and Kelsen's conversion to Catholicism was contemporaneous to the book's completion in 1905. In 1908 Kelsen won a research scholarship which allowed him to attend the University of Heidelberg for three consecutive semesters, where he studied with the distinguished jurist Georg Jellinek before returning to Vienna.

In 1911, he achieved his habilitation (license to give university lectures) in public law and legal philosophy, with a thesis that became his first major work on legal theory, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre entwickelt aus der Lehre vom Rechtssatze (Main Problems in Theory of Public Law, Developed from Theory of the Legal Statement). In 1919, he became full professor of public and administrative law at the University of Vienna, where he established and edited the Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht (Journal of Public Law). At the behest of Chancellor Karl Renner, Kelsen worked on drafting a new Austrian Constitution, enacted in 1920. The document still forms the basis of Austrian constitutional law. Kelsen was appointed to the Constitutional Court, for his lifetime.

During the early 1920s he published five major works in the areas of government, public law, and international law: in 1920, Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts (The Problem of Sovereignty and Theory of International Law) and Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (On the Essence and Value of Democracy); in 1922, Der soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff (The Sociological and Juristic Concepts of the State); in 1923, Österreichisches Staatsrecht (Austrian Public Law); and, in 1925, Allgemeine Staatslehre (General Theory of the State). In the late 1920s, these were followed by Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Naturrechtslehre und des Rechtspositivismus (The Philosophical Foundations of the Doctrine of Natural Law and Legal Positivism).

During the 1920s, Kelsen continued to promote his celebrated theory of the identity of law and state which made his efforts a counterpoint to the position of Carl Schmitt who advocated for the priority of the political concerns of the state. An important part of Kelsen's main practical legacy is as the inventor of the modern European model of constitutional review. This was first introduced in both Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1920, and then latter in the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and later many countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

As described above, the Kelsenian court model set up a separate constitutional court which was to have sole responsibility over constitutional disputes within the judicial system. Kelsen was the primary author of its statutes in the state constitution of Austria as he documents in his 1923 book cited above. This is different from the system usual in common-law countries, including the USA, in which courts of general jurisdiction from the trial level up to the court of last resort frequently have powers of constitutional review. Following increasing political controversy about some positions of the Constitutional Court of Austria, Kelsen faced increasing pressure from the administration which appointed him to specifically address issues and cases concerning the providence of divorce provisions in state family law. Kelsen was inclined to a liberal interpretation of the divorce provision while the administration which had originally appointed him was responding to public pressure for the predominantly Catholic country to take a more conservative position on the issue of the curtailment of divorce. In this increasingly conservative climate, Kelsen, who was considered a Social Democrat with liberal inclinations, although not a party member, was removed from the court in 1930.

Kelsen And His European Years Between 1930 and 1940

Kelsen accepted a professorship at the University of Cologne in 1930. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, he was removed from his post and moved to Geneva, Switzerland and taught international law at the Graduate Institute of International Studies from 1934 to 1940. During this time period, Hans Morgenthau departed from Germany to complete his Habilitation dissertation (licence to teach at Universities) in Geneva, for which Hans Kelsen advised, which resulted in his first book written in French being published entitled, The Reality of Norms and In Particular the Norms of International Law: Foundations of a Theory of Norms. By remarkable good fortune Hans Kelsen had just arrived in Geneva as a Professor and became an adviser to Morgenthau's dissertation. Kelsen was among the strongest critics of Carl Schmitt because Schmitt was advocating for the priority of the political concerns of the state over the adherence by the state to the rule of law. Kelsen and Morgenthau were united against this National Socialist school of political interpretation which down-played the rule of law, and they became lifelong colleagues even after both had emigrated from Europe to take their respective academic positions in the United States. During these years, Kelsen and Morgenthau had both become persona non grata in Germany during the full rise to power of National Socialism in Germany.

In 1934, at the age of 52, he published the first edition of Reine Rechtslehre (Pure Theory of Law). While in Geneva he became more deeply interested in international law. This interest in international law in Kelsen was in reaction largely to the Kellogg–Briand Pact in 1929 and his negative reaction to the vast idealism he saw represented in its pages, along with the lack of the recognition of sanctions for the illicit actions of belligerent states. Kelsen had come to endorse strongly the sanction-delict theory of law which he saw as substantially under-represented in the Kellogg–Briand Pact. In 1936–1938 he was briefly professor at the German University in Prague before returning to Geneva where he remained until 1940. His interest in international law would become especially focused in Kelsen's writings on international war crimes which he would redouble his efforts on behalf of after his departure to the United States.

Hans Kelsen And His American Years After 1940

In 1940, at the age of 58, he moved to the United States, giving the prestigious Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School in 1942. He was supported by Roscoe Pound for a faculty position at Harvard but opposed by Lon Fuller on the Harvard faculty before becoming a full professor at the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1945. During those years, he increasingly dealt with issues of international law and international institutions such as the United Nations. In 1953-54, he was visiting Professor of International Law at the United States Naval War College.

Another part of Kelsen's practical legacy, as he has recorded, was the influence that his writings from the 1930s and early 1940s had upon the extensive and unprecedented prosecution of political leaders and military leaders at the end of WWII at Nuremberg and Tokyo, producing convictions in more than one thousand war crimes cases. For Kelsen, the trials were the culmination of approximately fifteen years of research he had devoted to this topic, which started still in his European years, and which he followed with his celebrated essay, "Will the Judgment In the Nuremburg Trial Constitute a Precedent In International Law?," published in The International Law Quarterly in 1947. It was preceded in 1943 by Kelsen's essay, 'Collective and Individual Responsibility in International Law with Particular Regard to Punishment of War Criminals', 31 California Law Review, p 530, and in 1944 by his essay, "The Rule Against Ex Post Facto and the Prosecution of the Axis War Criminals," which appeared in The Judge Advocate Journal, Issue 8.

In Kelsen's companion 1948 essay for J.Y.B.I.L. to his 1943 "[...]War Criminals" essay cited in the above paragraph titled, "Collective and Individual Responsibility for Acts of State in International Law," Kelsen presented his thoughts on the distinction between the doctrine of respondeat superior and the acts of State doctrine when used as a defense during the prosecution of war crimes. On page 228 of the essay Kelsen states that, "Acts of State are acts of individuals performed by them in their capacity as organs of the State, especially by that organ which is called the Government of the State. These acts are performed by individuals who belong to the Government as the head of State, or members of the cabinet, or are acts performed at its command or with the authorization of the Government." Yoram Dinstein of Hebrew University in Jerusalem has taken exception to Kelsen's formulation in his book The Defense of 'Odedience to Superior Orders' in International Law, reprinted in 2012 by Oxford University Press, dealing with Kelsen's specific attribution of acts of State.

Shortly after the initiation of the drafting of the UN Charter on 25 April 1945 in San Francisco, Kelsen began the writing of his extended 700-page treatise on the United Nations as a newly appointed professor at the University of California at Berkeley (The Law of the United Nations, New York 1950). In 1952, he also published his book-length study about international law entitled Principles of International Law in English, and reprinted in 1966. In 1955, Kelsen turned to a 100-page essay, "Foundations of Democracy," for the leading philosophy journal Ethics; written during the height of Cold War tensions, it expressed a passionate commitment to the Western model of democracy over soviet and national-socialist forms of government.

This 1955 essay by Kelsen on democracy was also important for summarizing his critical stance towards the 1954 book on politics by his former student in Europe Eric Voeglin. Following this, in Kelsen's book entitled A New Science of Politics (Ontos Verlag, reprinted in 2005, 140pp, originally published 1956), Kelsen enumerated a point by point criticism of the excessive idealism and ideology which he saw as prevailing in Voeglin's book on politics. This exchange and debate has been documented in the appendix to the book, written by the Voeglin author Barry Cooper, entitled Voeglin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science from 1999. Kelsen's other book defending his realist position regarding the issue of the separation of state and religion as opposed to that of Voeglin's position on this issue was published postumously under the title Secular Religion. Kelsen's objective in part was to safeguard the importance of the responsible separation of state and religion for those sympathetic to religion and concerned with this separation. Kelsen's 1956 book was followed in 1957 by a collection of essays on justice, law and politics, most of them previously published in English. It had originally been published in the German language in 1953.

Legal theory

Kelsen is considered one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century and has been highly influential among scholars of jurisprudence and public law, especially in Europe and Latin America although less so in common-law countries.

Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law aims to describe law as a hierarchy of norms which are also binding norms while at the same time refusing, itself, to evaluate those norms. That is, 'legal science' is to be separated from 'legal politics'. Central to the Pure Theory of Law is the notion of a 'basic norm (Grundnorm)' -- a hypothetical norm, presupposed by the theory, from which in a hierarchy all 'lower' norms in a legal system, beginning with constitutional law, are understood to derive their authority or 'bindingness'. In this way, Kelsen contends, the bindingness of legal norms, their specifically 'legal' character, can be understood without tracing it ultimately to some suprahuman source such as God, personified Nature or a personified State or Nation. The last was of great theoretical and political importance in Germany and Austria of the 1930s, when Kelsen's principal antagonist was Carl Schmitt.

Kelsen's theory both drew from and has been developed by scholars in his homelands, notably the Vienna School in Austria and the Brno School led by František Weyr in Czechoslovakia. In the English-speaking world, H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz are perhaps the most well-known authors who were influenced by Kelsen, though both departed from Kelsen's theories in several respects. Among the principal writers in English on Kelsen are Robert S. Summers, Neil MacCormick (d. 2009), and Stanley Paulson. Among Kelsen's principal critics today is Joseph Raz of Columbia University who has excoriated the reading of Nuremberg and the war crimes trials which Kelsen had interpreted in a consistent manner throughout the 1930s and 1940s at the end of his essay for Am. J. Juris., p94, (1974) titled "Kelsen's Theory of the Basic Norm."

In his last years, Kelsen turned to a comprehensive presentation of his ideas on norms. The unfinished manuscript was published posthumously as Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms).

Some mystery surrounds the belated publication, in 2012, of Secular Religion. The text was begun in the 1950s, as an attack on work by his former pupil Eric Voegelin. In the early 1960s an expanded version was set up in proof but was withdrawn at Kelsen's insistence (and considerable personal expense in reimbursing the publisher), for reasons that have never become clear. However, the Hans Kelsen Institute eventually decided that it should be published. It is a vigorous defense of modern science against all, including Voegelin, who would overturn the accomplishments of the Enlightenment by demanding that science be guided by religion. Kelsen seeks to expose contradictions in their claim that modern science, after all, rests upon the same sorts of assumption as religion—that it constitutes forms of "new religion" and so should not complain when old religion is brought back in.

Political Philosophy

During the last 29 years of his life at the University of California, Kelsen's appointment at the University and his affiliation was primarily with the Department of Politics and not with the School of Law. This is strongly reflected in his many writings in the field of political philosophy both before and after joining the Faculty at Berkeley. In fact, Kelsen's very first book (see Section above) was written about the political philosophy of Dante Alighieri and it was only with his second book that Kelsen started to write book length studies about the philosophy of law and its practical applications.

In order to gain a useful understanding of the breadth of Kelsen's interests in political philosophy, it is informative to examine Charles Covell's book titled The Redefinition of Conservatism from the 1980s in which Covell engages Kelsen in the philosophical context of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott, John Casey and Maurice Cowling. Although Kelsen's own political preferences were generally towards more liberal forms of expression, Covell's perspective of modern liberal conservatism in his book provides an effective foil for bringing to light Kelsen's own points of emphasis within his own orientations in political philosophy. As Covell summarizes them, Kelsen's interests in political philosophy ranged across the fields of "practical perspectives underlying morality, religion, culture, and social custom."

Reception--Critics--Reaction

This section delineates the reception and criticism of Kelsen's writings and research throughout his lifetime. It also explicates the reaction of his scholarly reception after his death in 1973 concerning his intellectual legacy. Throughout his lifetime, Kelsen maintained a highly authoritative position representing his wide range of contributions to the theory and practice of law. Few scholars in the study of law were able to match his ability to engage and often polarize legal opinion during his own lifetime and extending well into his legacy reception after his death. One significant example of this involves his introduction and development of the term Grundnorm which can be briefly summarized to illustrate the diverse responses which his opinion was able to often stimulate in the legal community of his time. The short version of its reception is illustrative of many similar debates with which Kelsen was involved at many points in his career and may be summarized as follows.

Regarding Kelsen's original use of the term "Basic Norm," its closest antecedent appears in writings of his colleague Adolf Merkl at the University of Vienna. Merkl was developing a structural research approach for the understanding of law as a matter of the hierarchical relationship of norms, largely on the basis of their being either superior, the one to the other, or inferior with respect to each other. Kelsen adapted and assimilated much of Merkl's approach into his own presentation of the Pure Theory of Law in both its original version (1934) and its revised version (1960). For Kelsen, the importance of the "Basic Norm" was in large measure two-fold since it importantly indicated the logical regress of superior relationships between norms as they led to the norm which ultimately would have no other norm to which it was inferior. Its second feature was that it represented the importance which Kelsen associated with the concept of a fully centralized legal order in contrast to the existence of decentralized forms of government and representing legal orders.

Another form of the reception of the term originated from the fairly extended attempt to read Kelsen as a Neo-Kantian following his early exchange with Hermann Cohen in 1913 concerning the publication of his Habilitation dissertation in 1911 on Public Law. Cohen was a leading Neo-Kantian of the time and Kelsen was, in his own way, receptive to many of the ideas which Cohen had expressed in his published book review of Kelsen's writing. Kelsen had insisted that he had never used this material in the actual writing of his own book, though Cohen's ideas were attractive to him in their own right. This has resulted in one of the longest-running debates within the general Kelsen community as to whether Kelsen became a Neo-Kantian himself after the encounter with Cohen, or if he managed to keep his own non-Neo-Kantian position in tact which he claimed was the prevailing circumstance when he first wrote his book in 1911.

The Neo-Kantians, when pressing the issue, would lead Kelsen into discussions concerning whether the existence of such a Grundnorm was strictly symbolic or whether it had a concrete foundation. This has led to the further division within this debate concerning the currency of the term Grundnorm as to whether it should be read, on the one hand, as part and parcel of Hans Vaihinger's "as-if" hypothetical construction. On the other hand, to those seeking a practical reading, the Grundnorm corresponded to something directly and concretely comparable to a sovereign nation's federal constitution, under which would be organized all of its regional and local laws, and no law would be recognized as being superior to it.

In different contexts, Kelsen would indicate his preferences in different ways, with some Neo-Kantians asserting that late in life Kelsen would largely abide by the symbolic reading of the term when used in the Neo-Kantian context, and as he has documented. The Neo-Kantian reading of Kelsen can further be subdivided into three subgroups, with each representing their own preferred reading of the meaning of the 'Grundnorm,' which were identifiable as (a) the Marburg Neo-Kantians, (b) the Baden-Baden Neo-Kantians, and (c) his own Kelsenian reading of the Neo-Kantian school with which his writings on this subject are often associated, as found in his response to the Cohen exchange circa 1911-1914.

Early reception during his European years

This section covers Kelsen's years in Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. While still in Austria, Kelsen entered the debate on the versions of Public Law prevailing in his time by engaging the predominating opinions of Jellinek and Gerber in his 1911 Habilitation dissertation (see description above). Kelsen, after attending Jellinek's lectures in Heidelberg oriented his interpretation according to the need to extend Jellinek's research past the points which Jellinek had set as its limits. For Kelsen, the effective operation of a legal order required that it be separated from political influences in terms which exceeded substantially the terms which Jellinek had adopted as its preferred form. In response to his 1911 dissertation, Kelsen was challenged by the Neo-Kantians, originally led by Hermann Cohen, who maintained that there were substantial Neo-Kantian insights which were open to Kelsen, which Kelsen himself did not appear to develop to the full extent of their potential interpretation as summarized in the section above. Sara Lagi in her recent book on Kelsen and his 1920s writings on democracy has articulated the revised and guarded reception of Jellinek by Kelsen.

In addition to this debate, Kelsen had initiated a separate discussion with Carl Schmitt on questions relating to the definition of sovereignty and its interpretation in international law. Kelsen became deeply committed to the principle of the adherence of the state to the rule of law above political controversy, while Schmitt adhered to the divergent view of the state deferring to political fiat. The debate would have the effect of polarizing opinion not only throughout the 1920s and 1930s leading up to WWII, but has also extended into the decades after Kelsen's death in 1973.

A third example of the controversies with which Kelsen was involved during his European years surrounded the severe disenchantment which many felt concerning the political and legal outcomes of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles. Kelsen believed that the blamelessness associated with Germany's political leaders and military leaders indicated a gross historical inadequacy of international law which could no longer be ignored. Kelsen devoted much of his writings from the 1930s and leading into the 1940s towards reversing this historical inadequacy which was deeply debated until ultimately Kelsen succeeded in contributing to the international precedent of establishing war crime trials for political leaders and military leaders at the end of WWII at Nuremberg and Tokyo.

Critical reception during his American years

This section covers Kelsen's years during his American years. Kelsen's participation and his part in the establishment of war crimes tribunals following WWII has been discussed in the previous section. The end of WWII and the start of the United Nations became a significant concern for Kelsen after 1940. For Kelsen, in principle, the United Nations represented in potential a significant phase change from the previous League of Nations and its numerous inadequacies which he had documented in his previous writings. Kelsen would write his 700 page treatise on the United Nations, along with a subsequent two hundred page supplement, which became a standard text book on studying the United Nations for over a decade in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kelsen also became a significant contributor to the Cold War debate in publishing books on Bolshevism and Communism, which he reasoned were less successful forms government when compared to Democracy. This, for Kelsen, was especially the case when dealing with the question of the compatibility of different forms of government in relation to the Pure Theory of Law (1934, first edition).

The completion of Kelsen's second edition of his magnum opus on The Pure Theory of Law published in 1960 had at least as large an effect upon the international legal community as did the first edition published in 1934. Kelsen was a tireless defender of the application legal science in defending his position and was constantly confronting detractors who were unconvinced that the domain of legal science was sufficient to its own subject matter. This debate has continued well into the twenty-first century as well.

Critical reception of Kelsen's legacy after 1973

Many of the controversies and critical debates during his lifetime continued after Kelsen's death in 1973. Kelsen's ability to polarize opinion among established legal sholars continued to influence the reception of his writings well after his death. The formation of the European Union would recall many of his debates with Schmitt on the issue of the degree of centralization which would in principle be possible, and what the implications concerning state sovereignty would be once the unification was put into place. Kelsen's contrast with Hart as representing two distinguishable forms of legal positivism has continued to be influential in distinguishing between Anglo-American forms of legal positivism from Continental forms of legal positivism. The implications of these contrasting forms continues to be part of the continuing debates within legal studies and the application of legal research at both the domestic and the international level of investigation.

Hans Kelsen Institute and Hans Kelsen Research Center

For the occasion of Hans Kelsen's 90th birthday, the Austrian federal government decided on 14 September 1971 to establish a foundation bearing the name "Hans Kelsen-Institut". The Institut became operational in 1972. Its task is to document the Pure Theory of Law and its dissemination in Austria and abroad, and to inform about and encourage the continuation and development of the Pure Theory. To this end it produces, through the publishing house Manz, a book series that currently runs to more than 30 volumes. The Institut administers the rights to Kelsen's works and has edited several works from his unpublished papers, including General Theory of Norms (1979, translated 1991) and Secular Religion (2012, written in English). The founding directors of the Institut, Kurt Ringhofer and Robert Walter, held their posts until their deaths respectively in 1993 and 2010. The current directors are Clemens Jabloner (since 1993) and Thomas Olechowski (since 2011).

In 2006, the Hans-Kelsen-Forschungsstelle (Hans Kelsen Research Center) was founded under the direction of Matthias Jestaedt at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. After Jestaedt's appointment at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg in 2011, the center was transferred there. The Hans-Kelsen-Forschungsstelle publishes, in cooperation with the Hans Kelsen-Institut and through the publishing house Mohr Siebeck, a historical-critical edition of Kelsen's works which is planned to reach more than 30 volumes; as of July 2013, the first five volumes have been published.

Honours and awards

• 1938: Honorary Member of the American Society of International Law
• 1953: Karl Renner Prize
• 1960: Feltrinelli Prize
• 1961: Grand Merit Cross with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1961: Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
• 1966: Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna
• 1967: Great Silver Medal with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria
• 1981: Kelsenstrasse in Vienna Landstrasse (3rd District) named after him

See also

• Legal positivism
• List of Austrian scientists
• List of famous Austrians

Supplementary Reading

Selected Works by Kelsen

• Das problem der souveränität und die theorie des völkerrechts (Jan 1, 1920).
• Reine Rechtslehre, Vienna 1934; 2nd ed 1960. Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory (1934; Litschewski Paulson and Paulson trans.), Oxford 1992; the translators have adopted the subtitle of the first edition, Einleitung in die rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik, in order to avoid confusion with the English translation of the second edition.
• Law and Peace in International Relations, Cambridge (Mass.) 1942, Union (N.J.) 1997.
• Peace Through Law, Chapel Hill 1944, Union (N.J.) 2000.
• Pure Theory of Law (1960; Knight trans.), Berkeley 1967, Union (N.J.) 2002.
• Théorie pure du droit (1960; Eisenmann French trans.), Paris 1962.
• General Theory of Law and State (German original unpublished; Wedberg trans.), 1945, New York 1961, Clark (N.J.) 2007.
• What is Justice?, Berkeley 1957.
• 'The Function of a Constitution' (1964; Stewart trans.) in Richard Tur and William Twining (eds), Essays on Kelsen, Oxford 1986; also in 5th and later editions of Lloyd's Introduction to Jurisprudence, London (currently 8th ed 2008).
• Essays in Legal and Moral Philosophy (Weinberger sel., Heath trans.), Dordrecht 1973.
• Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (ed. Ringhofer and Walter), Vienna 1979; see English translation in 1990 below.
• Die Rolle des Neukantianismus in der Reinen Rechtslehre: eine Debatte zwischen Sander und Kelsen (German Edition) by Hans Kelsen and Fritz Sander (Dec 31, 1988).
• General Theory of Norms (1979; Hartney trans.), Oxford 1990.
• Secular Religion: a Polemic against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social Philosophy, Science, and Politics as "New Religions" (ed. Walter, Jabloner and Zeleny), Vienna and New York 2012; written in English.
• The Law of the United Nations. First published under the auspices of The London Institute of World Affairs in 1950. With a supplement, Recent Trends in the Law of the United Nations [1951]. A critical, detailed, highly technical legal analysis of the United Nations charter and organization. Originally published conjointly: New York: Frederick A. Praeger, [1964].

Further Selected Works in English about Kelsen

• Uta Bindreiter, Why Grundnorm? A Treatise on the Implications of Kelsen's Doctrine, The Hague 2002.
• Essays in Honor of Hans Kelsen, Celebrating the 90th Anniversary of His Birth by Albert A.; Et al. Ehrenzweig (1971).
• Die Wiener rechtstheoretische Schule. Schriften von Hans Kelsen, Adolf Merkl, Alfred Verdross.
• Law and politics in the world community: Essays in Hans Kelsen's pure theory and related problems in international law, by George Arthur Lipsky (1953).
• David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar, Oxford 1977.
• William Ebenstein, The Pure Theory of Law, 1945; New York 1969.
• Keekok, Lee. The Legal-Rational State: A Comparison of Hobbes, Bentham and Kelsen (Avebury Series in Philosophy) (Sep 1990).
• Ronald Moore, Legal Norms and Legal Science: a Critical Study of Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, Honolulu 1978.
• Stanley L. Paulson and Bonnie Litschewski Paulson (eds), Normativity and Norms: Critical Perspectives on Kelsenian Themes, Oxford 1998.
• Iain Stewart, 'The Critical Legal Science of Hans Kelsen' (1990) 17 Journal of Law and Society 273-308.
• Richard Tur and William Twining (eds), Essays on Kelsen, Oxford 1986.
• Jochnm von Bernstorff, Kelsen and International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2011, translated from the original German edition.
• Lars Vinx, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, Oxford 2007.

External links

• Hans Kelsen-Institut, Vienna
• Hans-Kelsen-Forschungsstelle, Freiburg
• Full Biography
• biographical note 1
• biographical note 2
• bibliographical note 1
• bibliographical note 2 - Kelsen's Werke