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Hans Kelsen (born October 11, 1881, Prague, died April 19, 1973) was an Austrian and American jurist of Jewish descent.
Early life
Born in Prague, he moved to Vienna with his family when he was three years old. He studied law at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1906. In 1911, he achieved his habilitation in public law and legal philosophy with his first major work, Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre.
In 1919, he became full professor of public and administrative law at the University of Vienna. Following the breakup of the Habsburg monarchy, he wrote a draft for the Austrian Constitution, which, with some amendments, was enacted in 1920 and still forms the basis of Austrian constitutional law to this day. He also became a member of the Austrian Constitutional Court.
Emigration
Following increasing political controversy about some positions of the Constitutioal Court and an increasingly conservative climate, Kelsen, who was a social democrat, had to resign from the court in 1930 and went on to teach at the University of Cologne. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, he was removed from his post and moved to Geneva, Switzerland. In 1934, he published his most famous work, the Pure Theory of Law. In 1940, he moved to the US, giving the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School in 1942 and becoming a full professor at the department of political science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1945. During those years, he increasingly dealt with issues of international law and international institutions such as the United Nations. He retired from teaching in 1952.
Legal theory
Kelsen is considered one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century. His legal theory, a very strict and scientifically understood type of positivism, is based on the idea of a Grundnorm, a hypothetical norm on which all subsequent levels of a legal system such as constitutional law and "simple" law are based.
His theory has followers among scholars of public law world-wide. His disciples developed "schools" of thought to extend his theories, such as the Vienna School in Austria and the Brno School in Czechoslovakia.
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