Austrian lawyer (1881–1973)
He built the skeleton beneath Austrian democracy and spent decades insisting that law is a system, not a sermon — a position that made him the most important legal theorist almost no one could place.
Born in 1881, Kelsen rose as a constitutional expert in post-war Vienna and drafted the 1920 Austrian Constitution, a document still in force today. His "pure theory of law" sought to describe legal systems without moral judgement, treating law as structure rather than ethics. Totalitarianism drove him from Austria to Germany, Switzerland, and finally to California in 1940. Roscoe Pound called him "unquestionably the leading jurist of the time" in 1934, but American law schools never gave him a permanent chair; he taught politics at Berkeley until 1952. He spent the next years rewriting his sl…
Sourced, dated quotes from Hans Kelsen
By determining law — so far as it is the subject of a specific science of law — as norm, it is delimited against nature; and science of law against natural science.
One of the most important elements of Christian religion is the idea that justice is an essential quality of God.
Justice is primarily a possible, but not a necessary, quality of a social order regulating the mutual relations of men.
Law is an order of human behavior. An “order” is a system of rules. Law is not, as it is sometimes said, a rule.
The mark of Platonic philosophy is a radical dualism.
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