Hans Kelsen
Project
Hans Kelsen Werke
The academy project Hans Kelsen Werk, which has been funded equally by the federal government and the (host) states since 2018, is currently the largest legal edition project in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the umbrella organization of eight German science academies. The supervising institution is the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.
With the Hans Kelsen Werke(n), the complete oeuvre of the Austrian-American legal scholar Hans Kelsen (1881-1973) is made accessible in a historical-critical hybrid edition.
Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Matthias Jestaedt and in cooperation with the Hans Kelsen Institute, Vienna, all of Kelsen's works are being edited historically and critically in chronological order and in the language of their (first) publication. In this way, Kelsen's writings from the fields of legal theory and legal philosophy, constitutional law and international law, state and constitutional theory, political theory and social anthropology are made accessible in their respective contexts of origin and at the same time their significance for his oeuvre as a whole can be recognized.
Digital and Print Publication
Five volumes of the historical-critical edition have already been published in Print by Mohr Siebeck Verlag.
The Hans Kelsen Research Center will publish the entire edition in 32 volumes both in print and digitally by the end of 2042. In addition to Matthias Jestaedt as editor of the Hans Kelsen works and the academic staff in Freiburg, a further research unit is based at the University of Frankfurt am Main for the project. Its focus is on the digital development of the hybrid edition.
The Digital Edition
The printed volumes published by CC BY 4.0 license. The volumes printed before 2018 will be subsequently prepared for digital use, while in future the digital and analog forms of the edition will be compiled as a single source in an XML-based digital edition environment. This will make machine-readable research data on Hans Kelsen's work available to the (legal) sciences in the long term.
Before the editorial conversion to an XML-based digital edition environment is completed, the typeset data of the volumes published to date will form the data basis for the digital edition of Hans Kelsen's corresponding works. The data modeling of the texts and the indexes using the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in XML is based on the basic format of the German Text Archive (DTABf) and is extended by project-specific requirements. A special feature of the texts compared to conventional source editions is, for example, the double footnote apparatus - that of Hans Kelsen and the editors' notes - as well as the heterogeneity of the texts themselves (book reviews, legal texts, essays, monographs).
Basic Scientific Approach of the historical-critical Edition
The Hans Kelsen Werke cover Kelsen's complete works and make use of Kelsen's scholarly legacy, which has only been selectively analyzed to date. They include both independent, monographic and dependent writings, works published during Kelsen's lifetime and posthumously as well as works that have not yet been published.
In order to preserve the context of origin as far as possible - which is particularly important for the classification of the overall work - Kelsen's published authentic and authorized texts are arranged in the order of their original publication; Kelsen's previously unpublished writings are treated mutatis mutandis. The contributions are printed in the language in which they were first published or written, i.e. in German (around 60 percent) and English (more than 30 percent). Reprints and translations are fully bibliographically referenced in the notes. The most important works by Kelsen, which are still particularly relevant today, are “opened up” for non-specialists by renowned Kelsen researchers from all over the world by means of concise introductory articles outlining the context, significance and history of impact.
Each volume will be accompanied by an index of persons and a subject index; in addition, the last volume of the edition will contain chronological, thematic and alphabetical bibliographies alongside the (personal and subject) complete index.