I was teaching Kelsen last year (a big chunk of the 2nd edition of the Pure Theory), and while doing background research I came across this remarkable story (that called to mind Isaiah Berlin’s infamous “recommendation” of H.L.A. Hart). Roscoe Pound at Harvard Law School had, correctly, identified Hans Kelsen as the preeminent figure in jurisprudence in the world, but he was unable to secure a permanent appointment for him at Harvard Law School in the 1940s due to the opposition of Lon Fuller, the contracts scholar and famously muddled dabbler in jurisprudence. Kelsen, who had lost his job in Cologne when the Nazis fired all the Jews from the civil service, eventually found an appointment in the political science department at Berkeley.

(For those outside legal philosophy, Fuller made two contributions: the wonderful “Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” which is a very nice tool for teaching questions of statutory interpretation and judicial role; and articulating the principles of legality, i.e., what has to be true of any system of guidance by rules (e.g., rules must be clear, public, non-retroactive etc.). From the latter, he drew all kinds of mistaken conclusions (as Hart, among others, showed). His debate with Hart in the pages of the Harvard Law Review in the 1950s, alas, is one of the more embarrassing public debates in jurisprudence [for Fuller, not Hart–Fuller was just clueless]. Kelsen, by contrast, was, with Hart, one of the two most important legal philosophers of the 20th-century, whose influence throughout the civil law world remains huge to this day. Hart, Raz, and many others engage with Kelsen, seriously albeit critically.)