Abstract
American legal scholarship has constantly challenged Hans Kelsen’s jurisprudence. However, the skepticism has motivated his defense of the pure theory of law’s alleged substantial and explanatory gaps. The following chapter analyzes and categorizes some of the arguments Kelsen develops in his defense and, in so doing, identifies human irrationality as an important, albeit undisclosed, hypothesis informing the pure theory of law. Claiming inter alia that a scientific, hence, analytical inquiry on justice is impossible, Kelsen traces two major jurisprudential issues back to their roots in human emotion. Nevertheless, his argument lacks further elaboration on the scholarly framework through which one might categorize human irrationality. The chapter also touches upon how psychoanalytical approaches to the law developed in the 1960s can fill the conceptual gap.
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Notes
- 1.
As Halbach stated: “A giant of the law has left us” (Halbach 1973: 957).
- 2.
Cf. the subtitle to Kelsen (1957) essay collection What is Justice?—Justice, Law and Politics in the Mirror of Science.
- 3.
Barton/Hill/Riesenfeld, 1977, University of California: In Memoriam.
- 4.
This may also be due to the criticism in the treatise’s substantial vagueness (Friedmann 1972: 1718, 1721).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Rephrasing cf. Kelsen, Justice (1957, 1, 3); on the original Bentham, A Fragment on Government, preface, 393: “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong, been as yet developed.”
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Acknowledgments
This essay is a contribution to Hans Kelsen in America, a conference sponsored by the Valparaiso University Law School, supported by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and held in Chicago on June 27–28, 2014. I am truly thankful to Jeremy Telman for the invitation to present my ideas in this forum and to Jörg Kammerhofer for the encouragement to further investigate my almost accidental discovery of Ehrenzweig’s supplementary function to Kelsen’s scholarship. Besides that, I am grateful to Matthias Jestaedt, to whom I owe my interest Hans Kelsen’s legal theory. Finally, I owe many thanks to my thesis supervisor, Marc-Philippe Weller, who invited me to present my ideas on Hans Kelsen’s importance for private international law in his colloquium in February 2014. In doing so, he gave me a forum to present a first draft of the ideas I will elaborate in this chapter.
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Rentsch, B.K. (2016). Hans Kelsen’s Psychoanalytic Heritage—An Ehrenzweigian Reconstruction. In: Telman, D. (eds) Hans Kelsen in America - Selective Affinities and the Mysteries of Academic Influence. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33130-0_9
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