page_title: Hans Kelsen
section_title: Kelsen's widespread contributions to legal theory
hierarchical_section_title: Hans Kelsen / Kelsen's widespread contributions to legal theory
context_page_description: Hans Kelsen was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He was the author of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, which to a very large degree is still valid today. Due to the rise of totalitarianism in Austria, Kelsen left for Germany in 1930 but was forced to leave this university post after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry. That year he left for Geneva and later moved to the United States in 1940. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as "undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time." While in Vienna, Kelsen met Sigmund Freud and his circle, and wrote on the subject of social psychology and sociology.
  By the 1940s, Kelsen's reputation was already well established in the United States for his defense of democracy and for his Pure Theory of Law. Kelsen's academic stature exceeded legal theory alone and extended to political philosophy and social theory as well. His influence encompassed the fields of philosophy, legal science, sociology, the theory of democracy, and international relations.
context_section_description: 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. It is stated that in the English-speaking world, and notably the "Oxford school" of jurisprudence", Kelsen's influence can be seen in H. L. A. Hart, Julie Dickson, John Gardner, Leslie Green, Jim Harris, Tony Honoré, Joseph Raz and Richard Tur, and "in the backhanded compliment of strenuous criticism, also in the work of John Finnis". Among the principal writers in English on Kelsen are Robert S. Summers, Neil MacCormick and Stanley L. 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., p 94, (1974) titled "Kelsen's Theory of the Basic Norm."
  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  In the early 1960s an expanded version was set up in proof but was withdrawn at Kelsen's insistence (and considerable personal expense in reimbursing the publisher), for reasons that have never become clear.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. Four major areas of Kelsen's contributions to legal theory over his lifetime included the following areas of (i) judicial review, (ii) hierarchical law, (iii) the de-ideologicalization of positive law to strongly disassociate all reference to natural law, and (iv) the clear delineation of the science of law and legal science in twentieth century modern law.
caption: Hans Kelsen established the principles of judicial review in the Constitutions of Austria and Czechoslovakia following the example of John Marshall in the American Constitutional experience.
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