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Kelsen and Contemporary Constitutionalism: The Continued Presence of Kelsenian Themes

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Kelsenian Legal Science and the Nature of Law

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Abstract

This chapter aims to demonstrate the enduring importance of Kelsen’s thought in contemporary constitutionalism and contends that constitutionalist are considerably more Kelsenian than is generally supposed. The chapter commences with a short reconstruction of three different periods in Kelsen’s legal thought: his contribution to Vienna law school under the influence of the German positivism; Kelsen’s commitment, from 1918 to 1933, to the newly-born Austrian republic; his forced emigration to the U.S.A. in 1940 and his encounter with the American school of law and political science. Kelsen’s contribution to contemporary constitutionalism begins with the great influence of his thought on the Austrian Constitution of 1920, which Kelsen defended in newspaper articles as well as in scholarly papers. The chapter maintains that Kelsenian legal science has continuing significance in two main fields of contemporary constitutionalism, both originated by the consideration of the constitution as a higher law: the first, the Austrian model for the judicial review of legislation, which shaped the European model of constitutional adjudication, nowadays diffused throughout the world; and the second, the ‘gradualist’ theory of the sources of law (the Stufenbau). It is argued that Kelsen’s legal thought has enduring import in the present-day crisis of constitutionalism not only for the legal understanding of multi-level government (monism v. dualism) but also for the globalization of constitutionalism and the idea of open-ended constitutionalism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is a tradition that has been studied deeply by these famous comparativists within the field of private law. However, the tradition has, in contrast, received less attention within the field of public law (see, for example, in relation to Italian administrative law, Cassese 1971).

  2. 2.

    Kelsen was, perhaps, the first jurist sought to intervene in the existing political debate through both the form of newspaper articles and form of academic writing in the form of books, article and reviews.

  3. 3.

    The emigration of Weimar and Austrian jurists to the U.S.A. still remains largely unexamined in the history of ideas and legal thinking, and the importance and impact that many jurists from Weimar or Austria such as Neumann, Kelsen, Fraenkel, Otto Kahn-Freund, Sinzheimer and Kirchheimer had in their new country could be better investigated: among the few works dealing with the American impact of Weimarian jurists see: on Sinzheimer, Coutu 2012; on Neumann and Kirchheimer, Scheuerman 1997; on Kirchheimer and Fraenkel, van Ooyen 2014; on Neumann, Salzborn 2009. In Italy there is only one piece of work which has been studied with more attention: the impact of Otto Kahn-Freund on the United Kingdom’s labour law, thanks to Gaetano Vardaro (see Vardaro 1982).

  4. 4.

    In 1921 Eduard Lambert, the then director of the Institut de Droit Comparé in Lyon (which he founded in 1920), published his famous pamphlet Le gouvernement des juges, opposing the introduction in France, and Europe as a whole, of the American approach to the judicial review of legislation (see, Lambert 1921).

  5. 5.

    This concept re-emerged among Italian legal scholars, because of the journal Politica del diritto (published since 1970 by Il Mulino), the primary theoretical journal of the Italian realist legal movement.

  6. 6.

    See Chapitre V (Du Pouvoir Judiciare), art. 3: Les tribunaux ne peuvent, ni s’immiscer dans l’exercice du Pouvoir législatif, ou suspendre l’exécution des lois, ni entreprendre sur les fonctions administratives, ou citer devant eux les administrateurs pour raison de leurs fonctions. [The courts cannot interfere in the exercise of legislative power, nor suspend the execution of laws, nor engage in administrative functions, nor summon before them administrators by reason of their functions]. On the question of the origin of the separation of powers doctrine, see Troper 1980, Blachèr 2001.

  7. 7.

    Renato Treves recounts that in September of 1932 he met Hans Kelsen in Cologne, where Kelsen gave him a manuscript of a new work (see Treves 1967, 12). This manuscript was then translated into italian by Treves and published in the journal Archivio Giuridico in 1933, before the publication of the German edition (see Kelsen 1933). Kelsen had intended to emigrate from Germany, and sought the translation of his works into languages other than German. According to Treves, the first version of Reine Rechtslehere in1933 was published, in addition, in Spanish, Swedish, Flemish and other European languages.

  8. 8.

    A similar process is evident, as a result of the existence and effect of European Court of Justice (ECJ) preliminary rulings. For evaluation of the relationship between the judges of the ECJ and judges of EU Member States concerning the provisions and application of domestic law within the framework of European law see, Weiler 1985, 217 ff.; Martinico 2008, 48 ff.

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  1. Institute of Law, Politics and Development, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Carrozza

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    Peter Langford

  2. Lancaster University Law School, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Ian Bryan

  3. Department of Law and Criminology, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, United Kingdom

    John McGarry

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Carrozza, P. (2017). Kelsen and Contemporary Constitutionalism: The Continued Presence of Kelsenian Themes. In: Langford, P., Bryan, I., McGarry, J. (eds) Kelsenian Legal Science and the Nature of Law. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 118. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51817-6_5

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