A New English Translation of Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre or Pure Theory of Law

FAIN: FA-56415-12

Stanley L. Paulson
Washington University (St. Louis, MO 63130-4862)

Working together with my wife, Bonnie Litschewski Paulson, I am proposing a new English-language translation of Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre or Pure Theory of Law in its second edition, published in Vienna in 1960, running 500 pages. I hold a contract for the project from the Oxford University Press. Kelsen rivals H.L.A. Hart as the most significant legal philosopher of the twentieth century, and this treatise, it is generally agreed, is his most representative work. The existing translation (1967) is seriously defective in a variety of ways; to avoid it, leading figures in the field, including Hart and Joseph Raz, have resorted to the French translation. The deficient English translation has also stood in the way of a robust reception of Kelsen’s work in the Anglo-American juridico-philosophical community.