Notre Dame Law Review Volume 22 | Issue 4 Article 1 5-1-1947 Some German Definitions of Law and Legal Philosophy from Kant to Kelsen Anton-Hermann Chroust Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Anton-Hermann Chroust, Some German Definitions of Law and Legal Philosophy from Kant to Kelsen, 22 Notre Dame L. Rev. 365 (1947). Available at: http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol22/iss4/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Law Review by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. NOTRE DAME LAWYER A Quarterly Law Review VOL. XXII MAY, 1947 No. 4 SOME GERMAN DEFINITIONS OF LAW AND LEGAL PHILOSOPHY FROM KANT TO KELSEN IN the evolution of a particularly problematic legal term within a particular age and civilization, the legal philoso- pher possesses an important clue to the legal mind of this period. Neither the philosopher, nor the jurist, nor the historian can ever hope for a complete understanding of a foreign legal civilization which to a great extent belongs to the past; partial understanding he can reasonably expect, however, if he undertakes to sift out certain key terms in order to determine their meaning in relation to other less problematic terms.' According to Kait the concept of law and right is some- thing derived exclusively from pure reason. "The jurist has to discover the true sources of all that can be called 1 This paper does not attempt to furnish a complete list of all the definitions of law and legal philosophy which have been proposed by the very prolific Ger- man writers on philosophy and jurisprudence during the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.