CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Péter Techet

Lawyer and historian. In his PhD in Modern European History, he deconstructed the narrative of “nationality conflicts” of the Late Habsburg monarchy by focusing on the Upper Adriatic region. In his PhD in Legal Theory, he analyzed the anti-positivist legal traditions of German legal thinking.

Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (in Regensburg) and the Leibniz Institute of European History (in Mainz). Visiting Fellow at the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, the New York University, and the University of Genoa.

He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Freiburg (in Germany) and at the University of Zurich. His current research is on the historical contextualization of Hans Kelsen’s “Pure Theory of Law”. He is focusing on how the (post-)Habsburg legacies and Kelsen’s experiences as constitutional judge in Austria shaped the theory.

Hans Kelsen is still one of the best-known and most influential legal scholars even in 2023, 50 years after his death. Less well-known is his more “political” role in the First (Austrian) Republic. After World War I, he was involved in drafting the new Austrian Federal Constitution. There he helped institutionalize the so-called “Austrian” model of “judicial review.” Between 1919 and 1930, he himself served as a judge on the newly established Austrian Constitutional Court.

This talk aims to examine the possibility of interpreting Hans Kelsen’s “Pure Theory of Law”–specifically his theory of law-application–as a theorization of the experiences of an active and, in many ways, “activist” constitutional judge. By emphasizing the political character of “law-application”, Kelsen was actually responding to the conservative government policy in Austria of the interwar period, which tried to “depoliticize” the Constitutional Court.