“Unlawful Law”: The Debate between Merkl and Sander within the Vienna School of Jurisprudence

每天，法律官员的决定都受到公众和专业人士的批评，他们被宣布为“错误”或“错误”。这往往意味着，被批评的法律决定是非法做出的。在围绕汉斯·凯尔森（Hans Kelsen, 1881-1973）的维也纳法理学学派的传统中，正是在“非法法律”的问题上，意见分歧最为广泛。这个问题的概念化形成了他的两个学生之间争论的核心：阿道夫·朱利叶斯·默克尔（1890-1970）和弗里茨·桑德（1889-1939）。这场争论将法律的不可靠性作为一种人为的工具，并在1918年至1930年期间动员了整个维也纳学派，对最终成为“Reine Rechtslehre”做出了重大贡献。利害攸关的问题无非是由谁来决定一项法律决定的合法性及其后果的问题。默克尔把首要地位归于法理学，而桑德则坚持法律程序或法律实践的首要地位。因此，他们标志着一个光谱的极端点，在这个光谱中，学校其他成员的观点也可以被定位。我的作品涉及这个迄今为止未被探索和几乎不为人知的争议；它的目的是提供一个辩论学-一个由思想史和思想史通知的学校内部辩论的法律理论重建。它部分基于以前未开发的档案材料，并声称产生以下知识收获：辩论学作为一般法律理论研究的一种策略被重新提出，因为通过观察相互冲突的模型可以更准确地掌握方法。本文还提供了维也纳学派的互动历史，首次将该研究网络的结构碎片和话语动态方面带入连贯的叙述中。默克尔和桑德的法律理论第一次以原创的形式独立呈现。被遗忘的桑德的法律程序理论被（重新）发现。因此，以下几点是适用的：如果不考虑默克尔和桑德的贡献，《纯粹法理论》就无法得到必要的深入理解。方法的多元性和多样性表现在揭示维也纳学派内部根本不同的观点：从相同的前提出发，在不离开纯粹法则理论的基础的情况下，可以获得完全不同的结果。通过重新发现解决“非法法律”这一日常问题的替代方法，我的工作使《纯粹法律理论》更适合今天的法律理论讨论；法理学的首要地位以及法律程序的首要地位可以作为超越纯粹法律理论传统的进一步法律理论研究的概念方案。

Every day, decisions of legal officials are criticised both in public and in professional circles, where they are declared to be ‘erroneous’ or ‘wrong’. This often means nothing other than that the criticised legal decisions were made unlawfully. It was precisely on the problem of ‘unlawful law’ that opinions were most widely divided in the tradition of the Vienna School of Jurisprudence around Hans Kelsen (1881–1973). The conceptualisation of this question formed the core of a controversy between two of his students: Adolf Julius Merkl (1890–1970) and Fritz Sander (1889–1939). This controversy, which took issue with the fallibility of law as a man-made tool and mobilised the entire Vienna School in the period from 1918 to 1930, contributed significantly to making the ‘Reine Rechtslehre’ what it eventually became. What was at stake was nothing less than the question of who decides on the lawfulness of a legal decision and what follows from it. While Merkl ascribed primacy to jurisprudence, Sander insisted on the primacy of legal procedure or legal practice. They thus marked the extreme points of a spectrum in which the perspectives of other members of the school can also be located. My work deals with this hitherto unexplored and virtually unknown controversy; it aims to offer a polemography – a legal-theoretical reconstruction of a school-immanent debate informed by the history of ideas and the intellectual history. It is based in part on previously unexplored archival material and claims to yield the following gains of knowledge:1. The polemography is rehashed as a strategy for the study of legal theories in general, as approaches can be more accurately grasped by observing competing models in collision mode.2. The text also offers an interactional history of the Vienna School, bringing fragments of the structure and facets of the discourse dynamics of this research network into a coherent narrative for the first time.3. The legal theories of Merkl and Sander are presented independently for the first time in an original form. Sander’s legal process theory, which has fallen into oblivion, is (re)discovered. Henceforth, the following shall apply: Without taking into account the contributions of Merkl and Sander, the Pure Theory of Law cannot be understood in the requisite depth.4. The plurality and diversity of approaches is expressed in the uncovering of fundamentally different views within the Vienna School: Starting from the same premises, quite different results can be achieved without leaving the ground of a Pure Theory of Law.5. By rediscovering alternative approaches to the daily problem of ‘unlawful law’, my work makes the Pure Theory of Law more accessible for today's legal-theoretical discussion; the primacy of jurisprudence as well as that of legal procedure are made usable as aconceptual scheme for further legal-theoretical research beyond the tradition of the Pure Theory of Law.