Full Description
Forty years after his death, Hans Kelsen (1881-1973) remains one of the most discussed and influential legal philosophers of our time. This collection of new essays takes Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law as a stimulus, aiming to move forward the debate on several central issues in contemporary jurisprudence. The essays in Part I address legal validity, the normativity of law, and Kelsen's famous but puzzling idea of a legal system's 'basic norm'. Part II engages with the difficult issues raised by the social realities of law and the actual practices of legal officials. Part III focuses on conceptual features of legal systems and the logical structure of legal norms. All the essays were written for this volume by internationally renowned scholars from seven countries. Also included, in English translation, is an important polemical essay by Kelsen himself.
Contents
1 Introduction
Luís Duarte d'Almeida, John Gardner and Leslie Green
I. LEGAL VALIDITY AND THE BASIC NORM
2 Norm-claims, Validity and Self-reference
Bert van Roermund
3 The Great Puzzle: Kelsen's Basic Norm
Stanley L Paulson
4 The Basic Norm Revisited
Riccardo Guastini
II. LAW'S EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE
5 The Efficacy of Constitutional Norms
Pablo E Navarro
6 The Realist Hans Kelsen
Uta Bindreiter
7 Wiener Realism
Pierluigi Chiassoni
8 Kelsen and Hägerström: Clearing Up Misunderstandings and Mapping Out the Common Ground
Jes Bjarup
9 A 'Realistic' Theory of Law and the Pure Theory of Law: Remarks
on Alf Ross's On Law and Justice
Hans Kelsen
III. LEGAL NORMS AND LEGAL SCIENCE
10 Kelsen on the Completeness and Consistency of Law
Eugenio Bulygin
11 The Alternative Character of the Legal Norm: Kelsen as a Defeasibilist?
Richard HS Tur
12 In Canonical Form: Kelsen's Doctrine of the 'Complete' Legal Norm
Luís Duarte d'Almeida
