Hans Kelsen Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Legal scholar Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on October 11, 1881, and raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He came from a Jewish family but was not particularly religious, and in 1905 he converted to Catholicism in an attempt to more fully assimilate into Austrian society. In 1906, Kelsen received a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna, where in 1911 he became a professor of constitutional and administrative law.

Kelsen served during World War I (1914–1918) as a legal advisor to the Austrian war minister. Following the war and subsequent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he resumed teaching law in Vienna, founded the Austrian Journal of Public Law, and played a central role in drafting the constitution of the First Austrian Republic. This constitution, which was implemented in 1920, is still in use (albeit in altered form) in present-day Austria. From 1921 to 1930, Kelsen was a member of the Austrian Constitutional Court but was eventually dismissed for political reasons. He moved to Germany in 1930 to teach international law at the University of Cologne, but, being of Jewish descent, fled to Geneva, Switzerland, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.

Kelsen was a prolific writer on a wide range of legal topics, but he is best known as a legal positivist and for his Pure Theory of Law (1934). In this work, Kelsen argues that an effective legal system should be based on objective laws rather than subjective political, social, or moral values. Lawyers should act as legal scientists and the law should be practiced and carried out as scientifically as possible. The law, Kelsen believed, is ultimately derived from a basic norm—or Grundnorm—and deals not with what is, but with what ought to be.

In the late 1930s, Kelsen taught at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva as well as the German University in Prague, but increasing anti-Semitism and the onset of World War II (1939–1945) made it virtually impossible for him to continue working. As a result, he and his family immigrated in 1940 to the United States. Kelsen lectured for two years at Harvard University, while simultaneously learning to speak English, before joining the political science faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. A highly productive period followed in which he published Peace Through Law (1944), General Theory of Law and State (1945), The Law of the United Nations (1950), Principles of International Law (1952), and What is Justice? (1957).

In the course of his long and productive career as a law professor, scholar, judge, and political philosopher, Kelsen influenced generations of students in Europe and the United States. In particular, his ideas had an enormous effect on the Vienna School of Legal Theory and legal positivists such as H. L. A. Hart. When Kelsen died in Berkeley, California, on April 19, 1973, he was recognized as one of the most notable legal scholars of the twentieth century. Today, the Hans Kelsen-Institut in Vienna, a federally funded foundation, commemorates his life, work, and legacy.

Bibliography:

Kelsen, Hans. General Theory of Law and State. New York: Russell and Russell,
The Law of the United Nations. New York: Praeger, 1950.
Peace Through Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
Principles of International Law. New York: Rinehart, 1952.
Pure Theory of Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
What is Justice? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

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