Hans Kelsen
| Hans Kelsen | |
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Hans Kelsen
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| Born |
October 11, 1881 Prague, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | April 19, 1973 (aged 91) Berkeley, California, United States |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Legal positivism |
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Notable ideas
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Pure Theory of Law |
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Influences
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Hans Kelsen (German: [hans ˈkɛlzən]; October 11, 1881 – April 19, 1973) was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. Due to the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria, Kelsen left his university post because of his Jewish ancestry, and departed to Geneva in 1933, and then to the United States in 1940. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as “undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time.” While in Vienna, Kelsen was a young colleague of Sigmund Freud 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 magnum opus Pure Theory of Law (Reine Rechtslehre). 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.
Late in his career while at the University of California, Berkeley, Kelsen rewrote Pure Theory of Law into a second version. Kelsen throughout his active career was also a significant contributor to the theory of judicial review, the hierarchical and dynamic theory of positive law, and the science of law. In political philosophy he was a defender of the state-law identity theory and an advocate of explicit contrast of the themes of centralization and decentralization in the theory of government. Kelsen was also an advocate of the position of separation of the concepts of state and society in their relation to the study of the science of law.
The reception and criticism of Kelsen's work and contributions has been extensive with both ardent supporters and detractors. Kelsen's contributions to legal theory of the Nuremberg trials was supported and contested by various authors including Dinstein at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kelsen's neo-Kantian defense of continental legal positivism was supported by H. L. A. Hart in its contrasting form of Anglo-American legal positivism, which was debated in its Anglo-American form by scholars such as Ronald Dworkin and Jeremy Waldron.
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