Talk:Pure Theory of Law

Untitled

This page should link to this page in German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reine_Rechtslehre. The page in German, "Reine Rechtslehre", links to the English page on "basic norm," which is an error.

Problem solved --Ingramhk (talk) 12:10, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

2010 rewrite

I have completely rewritten this article, which had contained many errors, and have extended the list of references. I have included in that list an article of my own, 'The Critical Legal Science of Hans Kelsen', not (I hope) out of hubris but because it is the only nearly up-to-date survey of the Pure Theory of Law that is available in English - or, to the best of my necessarily limited knowledge, at article length in any language. This article covers every vital source except the English translation of Allgemeine Theorie der Normen, now published as General Theory of Norms. If anybody wants to make a substantive change to my Wikipedia article, let us discuss first. I fully agree with the administrators' request (as to the previous version) for fuller referencing, but - as I think can be seen from my earlier article - Kelsen's output even as to the Pure Theory was very substantial and the secondary literature is vast. I have therefore allowed summary to take precedence.--Wikiain (talk) 05:36, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

For the record: this editor has a conflict of interest (see connected contributor statement above). The original rewrite by Wikiain added 12 kb in rev. 335417594 of 06:53, 2 January 2010, which was the first of these 9 edits, followed subsequently by 16 small edits from 2010 through 2017. On 2 Feb 2010 after Wikiain's first 9 edits, the article was 20,956 bytes; after their last edit on 18 Nov 2017 it was 28,366 bytes, with almost all of the increase coming from indeffed editor AutoJellinek (talk · contribs)'s 19:53, 6 August 2013 edit (diff). Mathglot (talk) 21:05, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

František Weyr

It is somewhat strange that František Weyr is not mentioned even once.

http://books.google.com/books?id=mP2eHYz0xngC&pg=PA202&lpg=PA202

http://www.muni.cz/people/63444/management_history — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.100.182.13 (talk) 05:49, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

You are quite right, though the omission was benignly intentioned. The importance of the Brno School should certainly be recognised. The trouble is that very little about them is available in English and the source you cite is rather encyclopedic. There is a source in German, Band 5 of the series published by the Hans Kelsen-Institut <http://www.univie.ac.at/staatsrecht-kelsen/schriftenreihe.php>. I look forward to getting a chance to read it. Bde 30 and 32 may also contribute. But I have to buy these volumes myself! --Wikiain (talk) 06:49, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Kelsen and Weyr were also publishing Revue Internationale de la Théorie du Droit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.100.182.13 (talk) 15:27, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Removing original research

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The section above describes the rewrite that took place in 2010 by COI editor Wikiain (talk · contribs), who added 12 kb in rev. 335417594 as part of these 9 edits, resulting in a 20kb article consisting of pure original research with no inline citations. Thirteen years later, the article remains entirely original research, and almost entirely uncited. The only exception to the lack of citations is in section § Chapters, which has one citation (added later by a good faith editor) per subsection, but these citations are worthless wrt WP:Verifiability because each subsection covers one chapter of the book, and the citation simply lists the entire page range of the book chapter that the article section covers; for example: for section § IV. The Static Aspect of Law of the article we have citation {{harvp|Kelsen|1960|pp=193–278}}, while the content remains what it was before when the COI editor added it, namely, unsupported original research; WP:Verifiability is not improved by having a second editor name the first and last page numbers of the book chapter involved when the content was never based on any secondary sources to begin with.

I started out by tagging sections that are uncited, but it soon became clear that there's a bigger problem than just a few sections. Per WP:OR and WP:V, I plan to switch from tagging to removing sections that are entirely unsourced and have been for over ten years. Once that is done, we'll see whether the remainder is worth saving, or whether a complete restart is required. Mathglot (talk) 22:32, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

The first set of removals is complete. Moving now to section § Chapters, which has eight subsections, one per chapter in the book. I've checked Google books and other sources and it's not entirely clear to me whether there is sufficient sourcing in independent, secondary sources that analyze the book at the per-chapter level to support a chapter-by-chapter breakdown in the article, but I don't think there is.

For example, for chapter 1, "Law and Nature", from this search I found "Normativity and Norms: Critical Perspectives on Kelsenian Themes" (Paulson et al., 1998) at result #12, and there's a passing mention of "Law and Nature" on page 211, but it's the only mention in the book. For chapter 2, "Law and Morals", we have this search, but aside from the bolded snippet in The Blackwell Guide (Golding-2008) at result #19—which is just a bibliography listing on page 47—there's nothing apparent in the search results that would support an entire subsection in the article about chapter two of the book, even a short one.

So, I don't think the article can support a per-chapter breakdown, because there doesn't appear to be sufficient sourcing out there for it. I only did a preliminary search, and it's possible a deeper search might be fruitful, so here are some find-sources links which may help:

"Find sources" links for individual chapters 1 – 8 of the book

chap. 1, "Law and Nature" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 2, "Law and Morals" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 3, "Law and Science" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 4, "The Static Aspect of Law" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 5, "The Dynamic Aspect of Law" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 6, "Law and State" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 7, "State and International Law" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL chap. 8, "Interpretation" : Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Handled this by replacing the chapter-level content with {{expand section}} tags containing "find sources" links, in case someone wants to expand it at that level of detail, although I suspect they will have to be merged into a book-level summary at some point. Next step, is redoing the lead with valid sourcing. Mathglot (talk) 00:41, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

That version is visible at rev. 1179161478‎, but I thought better of it an blanked the "Chapters" section. There's no point thaving eight empty subsections just sit there with empty section tags with "find sources" link sets which could be used to generate content for this putative section, and it can always be pulled back from history; plus the "find sources" links above are a permanent record and we don't need empty tags in the article. The article is now a stub with a new lead and two brand new (secondary!) (independent!) (reliable!) sources (soon to be three), so expansion can now begin. Mathglot (talk) 09:05, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

This section is now moot. Following the #2023 rewrite of the article, other than nine words in the lead sentence and one the in section "Reception", per WP:Who Wrote That? nothing remains of the previous content written by User:Wikiian. The article is structured completely differently now, is well sourced, and it is very unlikely that a return to a per-chapter structure organization could easily be supported by reliable sources. Mathglot (talk) 17:26, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

2023 rewrite

After a series of edits chipping away at the problems in earlier versions of the article noted above, the chip, chip, chipping left nothing much left, other than the appendixes (Further reading, and so on) and those edits ended up amounting to a slow-motion, WP:TNT. In any case, since then, I've been slowly been building it back up, and the good news is that there are plenty of good, reliable, secondary sources; in fact, there are more of them than I can deal with, so I've placed a lot of them in "Further reading", where they can be mined for further expansion of the article. In the meantime, at this writing there are now eleven 28 citations on eight 18 unique references, with plenty more expansion waiting in the wings. Mathglot (talk) 09:54, 10 October 2023 (UTC) — updated by Mathglot (talk) 09:52, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

I have not been following this article and would now comment:

1. I have removed the error that Kelsen was indebted to Bentham and Austin: they were precursors, not progenitors. See especially Kelsen, "The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical Jurisprudence" (1941) 55 Harvard Law Review 44; General Theory of Law and State, xv.

2. In the section "Reception", to trace influences only to Oxford scholars is absurd.

3. It seems to be suggested that the French legal system follows the Pure Theory, which is also absurd. That the Pure Theory fits the French system is quite another matter.

4. French writers find the 'apex' of the 'pyramid' not in the Constitution but, as the Pure Theory stipulates, in a basic norm. For example: Michel Troper, "La pyramide est toujours debout!" (1978) 94 Revue du doit public et de la science politique en France et à l'étranger 1523.

5. In the section "Criticism", to mention only Schmitt and so cursorily is further absurdity.

You refer to me (when I was named Wikiain) simply as a COI author, which looks disparaging. I had an entirely proper interest—as just the informed sort of person who should be writing on this subject—and disclosed it in a proper way. My 'interest' has since increased and will continue to do so.

It is not (I believe) out of pique that I suggest that you have damaged the text of this article so much that it must be either rewritten again (by whom?) or merged with Hans Kelsen (together with its valuable references). I would propose the merger, but instead hope that it will be proposed by a less 'interested' editor. Errantios (talk) 00:34, 13 January 2024 (UTC)