Hans Kelsen and His Pure Theory of Law

R. HANS KELSEN'S formal retirement from his professorship at the end of the current university year will mark another milestone in his varied and significant career. He has survived or escaped from two revolutions and a ruthless tyranny in central Europe. He has held honored and influ-ential academic positions in five nations and on two continents. He has built and rebuilt a systematic philosophy of law and the state which has won him a place among the most distinguished legal-political philosophers of the present century. In this short article I propose to sketch his career and to state concisely what I conceive to be the most valuable contributions to American legal theory which can be derived from his writings. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on October 11, 1881, Hans Kelsen attended the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in law there at the age of twenty-five. After a few years of additional study at the Uni-versities of Heidelberg and Berlin, he became in 1911 professor of public law and jurisprudence at the University of Vienna. Here he remained fo