Kelsen on legal interpretation

Abstract

A number of writers have invited attention to the fact that Kelsen, in a long and extraordinarily productive career, gave very little attention to questions of legal interpretation. Kelsen's younger colleague in the Vienna School of Legal Theory, Fritz Schreier, himself a legal philosopher of note, remarked in 1929 that the Vienna School had neglected interpretation. Michael Thaler made the same point a half century later, writing that Kelsen devoted himself ‘entirely to an elucidation of the object of interpretation’, that is to say, the legal norm itself, without providing any details on ‘ how interpretation is to be done’. Other recent writers go further: Klaus Adomeit dismisses Kelsen's theory of interpretation as ‘methodological nihilism’ Günther Winkler writes that Kelsen’s theory, although ‘simple’, is both ‘mistaken and misleading’. Indeed, most recent writers who have examined the Pure Theory of Law on questions of legal interpretation take a dim view of Kelsen's work in the field.