Hans Kelsen

Hans Kelsen was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. Due to the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria, Kelsen left his university post because of his Jewish ancestry, and departed to Geneva in 1933, and then to the United States in 1940. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time. While in Vienna, Kelsen was a young colleague of Sigmund Freud and wrote on the subject of social psychology and sociology.

Kelsen was born in Prague into a middleclass, Germanspeaking, Jewish family. His father, Adolf Kelsen, was from Galicia, and his mother, Auguste Lwy, was from Bohemia. Hans was their first child there would be two younger brothers and a sister. The family moved to Vienna in 1884, when Hans was three years old. After graduating from the Akademisches Gymnasium, Kelsen studied law at the University of Vienna, taking his doctorate in law onMay 1906 and his habilitation onMarch 1911. Twice in his life, Kelsen converted to separate religious denominations. At the time of his dissertation on Dante and Catholicism, Kelsen was baptised as a Roman Catholic onJune 1905. OnMay 1912 he married Margarete Bondi , the two having converted a few days earlier to Lutheranism of the Augsburg Confession they would have two daughters.

Source: Wikipedia