Hugo Krabbe
Hugo Krabbe (3 February 1857 - 4 February 1936) was an influential Dutch public lawyer and legal philosopher. Notable for his theory of the sovereignty of the law, he is often regarded as a precursor of Hans Kelsen. Life. Born in Leiden to a Dutch Reformed minister, Christiaan Krabbe, and Maria Adriana Machteld Scholten, Hugo Krabbe attended Stedelijk Gymnasium in Leiden, where he received his diploma in 1874, and studied law and political science at Leiden University. Before starting the academic career, he was appointed to the civil service in Gelderland and in North Holland. In 1883 he obtained  the doctorate in law with the dissertation "De burgerlijke staatsdienst in Nederland" ("The civil state service in the Netherlands"). In 1888 he became chief commissioner at the Ministry of the Interiors. Under the direction of the minister Tak van Poortvliet (progressive liberals) he played an important role in drafting a proposal for reform of the electoral system that if approved would have extended the right to vote to the whole adult male population. Partly through Tak van Poortvliet's intercession, in 1894 Krabbe was appointed professor of constitutional and administrative law at the University of Groningen, where he succeeded Jacques  Oppenheim, who had moved to the University of Leiden. He accepted the professorship with an inaugural address on 2 February 1894 on "De werkkring van den staat (""The office of the state"). When Oppenheim was appointed to the Council of State, Krabbe joined Leiden University as his successor. On 4 March 1908 he accepted the professorship of constitutional and administrative law with an inaugural address on "De idee der persoonlijkheid in de staatsleer" ("The idea of personality in the state doctrine"). Krabbe remained at Leiden University teaching international law and public law for the rest of his career. In 1923 -1924 he served as a rector. He retired in 1927 with a farewell lecture on his flagship topic, "Staat en recht" ("State and law"; "the core of the constitutional law, which I have taught for 33 years"). Three years after resigning as professor, he published his "Kritische Darstellung der Staatslehre" ("Critical presentation of the doctrine of the state") but soon retired as chairman of the "Vereeniging voor Wijsbegeerte des Rechts" (Association for the philosophy of law), which had been set up in 1919 partly on his initiative. Krabbe was the teacher of Roelof Kranenburg (1880-1956), an important constitutional lawyer  and politician, and his work is said to have influenced other constitutional lawyers and politicians such as Ernst van Raalte (1892-1975), Frederik Johan Albert Huart (1896-1935), Ivo Samkalden (1912-1995) and Johan Jozef Boasson. Another eminent PhD student of Krabbe is the Dutch economist Gijsbert Weijer Jan Bruins. Doctrine. Soon before the start of World War I, Krabbe developed a theory of law and state which was destined to stir up much controversy in the interwar period. Some of its main ideas can be summarised as follows: In Krabbe's time, Dutch public law doctrine was strongly influenced  by legal positivism, which was either drawn from the English analytical jurisprudence of John Austin, Westel W. Willoughby and others, or from the German "Staatsrechtslehre" of Carl Friedrich von Gerber, Paul Laband, Rudolf von Jhering and Georg Jellinek. These two strands of jurisprudence shared the idea that the ultimate foundation of the law lies in the will of the sovereign and/or in the will of the state. Krabbe rejected that idea and placed the notion of legal consciousness of humanity at the basis of legal normativity. Under the influence of the psychological theories of Gerardus Heymans, who was a personal  friend of his and had helped him to translate his works into German, Krabbe developed a naturalistic jurisprudence with a psychologically and sociologically grounded concept of law. Relatively close to Otto von Gierke, Hugo Preuss, Leon Duguit, Léon Michoud and to the theories of the Scandinavian legal realists (Lundstedt, Hägerström, Olivecrona, Ross), Krabbe's work exhibits a strong normative orientation and emphasis on progressive and cosmopolitan ideals, which make it an exemplar of a sociologically inspired natural law theory: In 1906 Krabbe published in German his seminal book "Die Lehre der Rechtssouveränität" ("The doctrine of the sovereignty of law"), which  has been one of the most controversial works in Dutch legal science together with his following book "De moderne staatsidee" ("The Modern State Idea"), published in 1915 and soon translated into German, French and English. The fact that the translation of the latter book was undertaken by two well-established American academics, the political philosopher Georg H. Sabine and professor of political science Walter J. Shepard, and that they wrote eighty pages of translators’ introduction, shows Krabbe's international acknowledgment, his topicality at the time and the salience of his contribution to the international liberal values during the interwar period  often associated with Wilsonianism. Against the doctrine of state sovereignty, Krabbe opposed the notion of sovereignty of law, which he saw as an evolutionary accomplishment of the modern state and which he related to the historical process towards a "supranational law" and an integrated world legal system (i.e., cosmopolitanism and monism under international law). These ideas were often received with incredulity by the legal scholar of the time; Roelof Kranenburg, a loyal disciple of Krabbe, wrote that Krabbe had in him "as much of the prophet as of the professor". The identification of state and law, and the idea that  state law and international law are integrated into a unique system were embraced in the 1920s by the leading Austrian public lawyer and legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, who recognised the debt he owed to Krabbe and praised his work as a “masterly critique of the German theory of public law”. As noted by Carl Schmitt, however, Krabbe did not subscribe to the neo-Kantian epistemological and methodological assumpations of Kelsen, and was rather engaged in a sociological investigation on the distinctive features of the modern state, where "[w]e no longer live under the authority of persons, be they natural or  artificial (legal) persons, but under the rule of laws, (spiritual) forces. This is the essence of the modern idea of the state." Krabbe, contrary to Kelsen, conceived the sovreignty of law and the identity of state and law as a historically evolved achievement rather than a necessary transcendental presupposition of legal knowledge.