College of William & Mary Law School William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty and Deans 2003 Hans Kelsen and the Logic of Legal Systems Michael S. Green William & Mary Law School,
[email protected] Repository Citation Green, Michael S., "Hans Kelsen and the Logic of Legal Systems" (2003). Faculty Publications. 173. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/173 Copyright c 2003 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs ALABAMA LAW REVIEW Volume 54 Winter 2003 Number2 HANS KELSEN AND THE LOGIC OF LEGAL SYSTEMS Michael Steven Green• Hans Kelsen is generally considered to be the most important legal theorist of the twentieth century, 1 and his pure theory of law has long been the focus of intense scrutiny among foreign-language legal scholars? But it is only recently, after decades of neglect, that English-language studies of Kelsen have begun to appear.3 * Assistant Professor, George Mason University School of Law; Ph.D. (Philosophy), Yale Univer- sity 1990; J.D., Yale Law School 1996. I would like to thank Kiersten Boyce, Robert Hanna, Stanley Paulson, Richard Posner, Dhananjai Shivakumar, and James Q. Whitman for helpful comments. This Article was written with support from George Mason University School of Law and its Center for Law and Economics. Thanks also go to King's College's School of Law at the University of London for providing me with a home during my sabbatical leave from George Mason. 1. See HORST DREIER, RECHTSLEHRE, STAATSSOZIOLOGIE UND DEMOKRATIETHEORIE BEl HANS KELSEN 16 (1986) (stating that the title "jurist of the century" is "commonly used" in connection with Kelsen); William Ebenstein, The Pure Theory of Law: Demythologizing Legal Thought, 59 CAL.