1. Method and construction of international law in nineteenth century German scholarship 2. Kelsenian formalism as critical methodology in international law 3. An 'objective' architecture of international law: Kelsen, Kunz, and Verdross 4. The new actors of universal law 5. Legal sources as universal instruments of law creation 6. The international judiciary as the functional center of universal law 7. The role of the international legal scholar in Kelsen - a concluding reflection Epilogue. On Kelsenian formalism in international law.

The Public International Law Theory of Hans Kelsen: Believing In Universal Law

In a departure from the mainstream methodology of a positivist-oriented jurisprudence, Collective Rights provides the first legal-theoretical treatment of this area. It advances a normative-moral standpoint of 'value collectivism' which goes against the traditional political philosophy of liberalism and the dominant ideas of liberal multiculturalism. Moreover, it places a theoretical account of collective rights within the larger debate between proponents of different rights theories. By exploring why 'collective rights' should be differentiated from similar legal concepts, the relationship between collective and individual rights and why groups should be recognised as the third distinctive type of right-holders, it presents the topic as connected to the larger philosophical debate about international law of human rights, most notably to the problem of universality of rights.

Collective Rights: A Legal Theory

The present work offers an original approach on the legal notions developed by Hans Kelsen in his attempts towards a “pure” theory of Law, based on a philosophical analysis of the main legal concepts that have a strong philosophical feature, namely those notions which are somehow “shared” between the two fields in their name, but not always in their meaning. While the most striking notion to be approached via a philosophical perspective would probably be that of legal validity (since validity is a central term also in Logic), we aim, in the same way, to approach the notions of legal fictions, the notion of science in Law, normative conflicts or “contradictions” as they are commonly – and wrongly – named, and the rule of inference as it is applied in the context of normative creation, giving place to the wrong notion of practical reasoning. The notion of practical reasoning is very rich in this context of comparison, and will be a special one, as it serves for us to analyze traditional problems of legal theory, such as Jorgensen’s dilemma, as well as it offers us the opportunity of providing our own alternative of a logical treatment of the process of legal justification of the creation of a norm. We aim to analyze the notion of legal and logical conditions as well, which represent a changing in Kelsen’s perspective on the utility and legitimacy of the application of logic to the legal domain. Such a comparative study, even if it appears to be fundamental for clarifying those notions in their respective fields, is a task never before developed in this systematic manner. The objective of such a study is to provide a clear overview of the boundaries between the fields of philosophy (especially logic) and the legal norms. A clear understanding of the relations between those “homonym” notions may explain why they are most of the time misused when philosophers talk about law, as well as when lawyers try to justify the concepts composing the legal theory.The context of this study is the legal positivism as it is explained by the legal-philosopher Hans Kelsen. This choice is justified by the fact that Kelsen’s legal theory appears to be the most suitable frame for an analytical, logic-oriented investigation. The work emphasized will be the General Theory of Norms (1979), mainly because of the fact that this book represents how intensively Kelsen dedicated himself to the legal problems mostly related to philosophy or logic, namely the question of the application of logic to norms and the clarification of problematic notions such as the basic norm as a fiction or, still, the notion of modally indifferent substrate.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01221770/document

A philosophical reading of legal positivism

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01916599.2021.1898438

Hermann Kantorowicz and Hans Kelsen: from debating legal sociology to constructing an international legal order

Hans Kelsen's Normativism

Die Norm als Tatsache: zur Normentheorie Hans Kelsens

Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law is the most prominent example of legal normativism. This text traces its origins and its genesis. In philosophy, normativism started with Hume's distinction between Is- and Ought-propositions. Kant distinguished practical from theoretical judgments, while resting even the latter on normativity. Following him, Lotze and the Baden neo-Kantians instrumentalized normativism to secure a sphere of knowledge which is not subject to the natural sciences. Even in his first major text, Kelsen claims that law is solely a matter of Ought or normativity. In the second phase of his writings, he places himself into the neo-Kantian tradition, holding legal norms to be Ought-judgments of legal science. In the third phase, he advocates a barely coherent naive normative realism. In the fourth phase, he supplements the realist view with a strict will-theory of norms, coupled with set-pieces from linguistic philosophy; classical normativism is more or less dismantled.

Carsten Heidemann

Papers

Die Norm als Tatsache: zur Normentheorie Hans Kelsens

Hans Kelsen's Normativism