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, 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 '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 .  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 section above describes the rewrite that took place in 2010 by COI editor, who added 12 kb in rev. 335417594 as part of , 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, 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 of the article we have citation , 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, 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:


 * chap. 1, "Law and Nature" :
 * chap. 2, "Law and Morals" :
 * chap. 3, "Law and Science" :
 * chap. 4, "The Static Aspect of Law" :
 * chap. 5, "The Dynamic Aspect of Law" :
 * chap. 6, "Law and State" :
 * chap. 7, "State and International Law" :
 * chap. 8, "Interpretation" :


 * 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 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)

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 object that what I wrote was mostly "pure original research". No: it was not "original", i.e. original to WP. It was based on and cited an article of mine, published in a leading journal and itself extensively referenced. There was no comparably extensive and up-to-date summary of the Pure Theory.  Its references would have been difficult to incorporate here, particularly when they were not in English—and it is essential to bypass the poor translations, General Theory of Law and State and Pure Theory of Law.


 * 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) Errantios (talk) 23:48, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Point by point:
 * 1. What you removed didn't say that. The lead is a summary of the body, and that sentence was summarizing the roots of legal positivism in the introductory section, and I don't think you'd disagree about Bentham and Austin in that regard. That said, your removing it from the lead didn't introduce problems, merely shortened the lead, so I'm not going to quibble further about this; those who want to know more about the roots of positivism can read the body or follow the link. Suggesting that one should rely on a source by Kelsen himself would be a non-independent source for such an assertion; however, since the content has been removed already, it is moot.
 * 2. There is no such claim that it is due "only to Oxford scholars", you assert that here but it is not in the article. And it is not helpful toward the goal of improving the article to say so. It would be accurate to point out that that that section omits more important parts of the story, such as A, B, and C. There is no deadline for improving a Wikipedia article, and since Wikipedia is entirely staffed by volunteers, whatever omissions exist in an article are opportunities for improvement. Please keep in mind that complaining about the state of an article without suggesting an improvement serves no purpose and is contrary to the purpose of a Talk page. The fact that these omissions exist could be due to a hundred things, from lack of volunteer time, to lack of volunteer interest, or that no one has gotten around to it yet. When volunteers start getting paid, if they fail to complete their assignment then they can get fired; but that is not how Wikipedia operates.
 * 3. I have no idea how to respond to this claim, which seems to rest on the idea that France's system "following" Kelsen is absurd, but that it "fits" Kelsen's theory is something else. I don't see light-years of difference between those two formulations but if you do, please suggest some improvements in wording. (See #2.) It is certainly the case that reliable, secondary sources in French frequently mention Kelsen; a few of them are already in the article. If we want to expand the section, or need more sources, I'll pick one of these 9,000 sources.
 * 4. Not at all; innumerable sources place the Constitution at the top, such as French government website article entitled Quelle est la place de la Constitution dans la hiérarchie des normes juridiques ? and answers the title question with, "The Constitution is considered the highest norm in the hierarchy of national norms." There is no end to the number of sources which confirm this, governmental, or non-governmental.
 * 5. Same point as #2: WP:NODEADLINE. Kindly refrain from labeling portions of the article as an "sbsurdity" just because they are incomplete. Instead, propose some content to expand them.
 * Regarding original research in your version: none of that content remains in the article, so it's not relevant now, and I see no point in wasting time on it at this point. One tip though for future expansion here (or elsewhere): there is no problem adding citations to foreign sources if they are reliable, when English sources of equivalent value cannot be found. Regarding a translation of Kelsen: whether it is poor or not is mostly irrelevant, as everything he wrote is a WP:PRIMARY source wrt to the content in this article so isn't usable to verify most content anyway, although it can of course be used to verify what he wrote (though not what he meant). The quality of a translation may be relevant for whether and which quotations should be chosen from among those translations.
 * I'm sorry if you thought my not naming you was disparaging; that was not my intent. My intent was to spare you, not to disparage you. Your interest in the article, given your published papers about the same topic, is natural, but Wikipedia's interest in maintaining a neutral point of view and avoiding original research is paramount, and trumps your interest in the topic, I'm afraid. The best way for you to continue to contribute to this topic is to use this page, if you wish, to make concrete improvement proposals. I think you will get strong pushback if you edit the article directly, and I appreciate the fact that you have not done so (except for the one case previously mentioned).
 * I reject your characterization of the article as worse or damaged, or that it now needs to again be rewritten. Your last version of the article contained a total of eight citations to (a PRIMARY source) and 4,000 words of content in multiple sections describing and analyzing Kelsen's theory with not a single secondary source anywhere to be found. Other than quotations ascribed to Kelsen, 100% of the article at that point was your WP:original research, from beginning to end.  In contrast, in the current version nearly every bit of it is sourced with one or more of 28 citations to 15 independent, reliable, secondary sources. (Three citation needed tags remain.) To argue that it needs a rewrite now is baseless and without foundation; indeed, it is risible, considering the state it started out from.
 * Finally, regarding a merger: given the major and enduring importance of Kelsen's theory typified by its reception as "the single most important intellectual achievement of contemporary jurisprudence", I feel that the article should rather be expanded to double its current size and not merged. That said, you are welcome to propose one on this page. Mathglot (talk) 02:13, 6 May 2024 (UTC)


 * It is difficult for me to respond to your points while you continue to accuse me of undeclared conflict of interest. Let me remind you of the criteria (WP:COI)


 * Conflict of interest (COI) editing involves contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships. Any external relationship can trigger a conflict of interest. Someone having a conflict of interest is a description of a situation, not a judgment about that person's opinions, integrity, or good faith.


 * Which of these kinds of relationship are you implying that I have? I have none.  Therefore kindly remove the COI templates that you say you have inserted (I can’t see them, but you say they are there). Errantios (talk) 00:28, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * This article Talk page is the wrong venue for this issue. I will reply at your Talk page regarding questions that are related to you personally, rather than about how to improve the content of this article. Mathglot (talk) 01:21, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * You raised a COI issue here, so I replied here. You have then pursued the matter on my Talk page, so I have then replied there. Errantios (talk) 12:15, 7 May 2024 (UTC)