Felix Kaufmann, Logik und Rechtswissenschaft (1922)

Kaufmann’s book is an early, programmatic attempt to ground Kelsen’s “reine Rechtslehre” in Husserlian logic and phenomenology. Its governing thesis is that legal theory becomes exact only when it stops deriving its concepts from empirical legal life, psychology, power, purpose, or moral value, and instead reconstructs the form of legal meaning. The work announces this architectural ambition plainly:

Sie stellt den Versuch eines Aufbaues der Rechtstheorie dar, und zwar derart, daß die Grundmauern dieses Gebäudes einzig und allein in dem Boden der Logik ihren Halt finden.

English translation: It represents the attempt to construct legal theory in such a way that the foundations of this edifice find their support solely and exclusively in the ground of logic.

The first part therefore develops a general Wissenschaftslehre. Kaufmann rejects psychologism and empiricism because they dissolve validity into fact and cannot account for necessary truth. Logic is not syllogistic technique but the theory of sense, truth, and systematic unity:

Damit ist nun jene fundamentale Dreieinheit von Sinn (Logos), Wahrheit und System bezeichnet, deren klärende Erfassung die eigentliche Aufgabe der Logik darstellt.

English translation: Herewith is designated that fundamental trinity of sense (Logos), truth, and system, whose clarifying comprehension constitutes the proper task of logic.

From Husserl he takes the decisive distinction between fact and essence, experience and Wesensanschauung. The central logical moves are the separation of meaning from accompanying images, of object from content, and of formalization from mere generalization. A science is not an aggregate of abstractions from cases; it is a system of necessary judgments grounded in the essence of its object. Hence Kaufmann’s definition:

Jede theoretische Wissenschaft ist ein Inbegriff synthetischer Urteile a priori.

English translation: Every theoretical science is a totality of synthetic a priori judgments.

This first part also supplies the tools later applied to law: the theory of meaningful and empty propositions, the compatibility of material spheres, the analysis of Satzformen, and the claim that system is the unity of truths flowing from a concept. The analogy with physics is methodological, not naturalistic: physics shows most clearly how a science orders phenomena under formal laws, and legal science must achieve an analogous purity for norms.

The second part transfers these results to jurisprudence. Legal theory is not history, politics, sociology, or ethics, but the eidetic theory of law’s form. Kaufmann distinguishes Rechtsdogmatik, which works with the changing contents of positive legal propositions, from Rechtstheorie, which seeks the a priori form of legal propositions:

Was den Juristen angeht, ist der empirisch wandelbare Inhalt der Rechtssätze, was den Rechtstheoretiker angeht, ist die a priori feststehende Form der Rechtssätze.

English translation: What concerns the jurist is the empirically variable content of legal propositions; what concerns the legal theorist is the a priori fixed form of legal propositions.

Against command theories, he argues that the norm is not an imperative expressing a will. “Sollen” is an objectivation of a stance, freed from the subjective act of willing; therefore legal validity cannot be grounded in a psychological will, a Rechtsmacht, recognition, or an addressee. The critique of the imperative theory is condensed in the sentence:

Die Imperativtheorie, aber auch nur sie, ist gebunden an die Annahme eines Normenadressaten.

English translation: The imperative theory, and only it, is bound to the assumption of an addressee of the norm.

Kaufmann then reconstructs the Rechtssatz as a double norm: a subject ought to behave in a certain way; if not, another behavior ought to occur toward that subject. The juristic core is not causality, sanction as empirical evil, or state power, but formal imputation. This also explains why “Verhalten” must be the basic legal element: it is the genus of action and omission, avoiding causal-psychological constructions of will and deed.

The later chapters test the method on legal concepts. Pure legal concepts must be generated from the elements of the pure simple legal proposition: person, behavior, fact, and ought. Mixed legal concepts, such as thing and real right, contain extra-juridical material. The subjective right is thus not will-power or protected interest, but a formal correlate of duty:

A ist dem B gegenüber berechtigt, wenn und insoweit als B dem A gegenüber verpflichtet ist.

English translation: A is entitled with respect to B if and insofar as B is under obligation with respect to A.

Kaufmann radicalizes Kelsen through Husserl by turning pure legal theory into a formal ontology of legal meaning. His target is every empiricist jurisprudence that mistakes legal concepts for abstractions from positive law or social power. His constructive aim is a symbolic, systematic Rechtslehre in which equivalence, subordination, accessory relation, subsidiarity, concurrence, and incompatibility of legal facts can be treated with logical rigor. The final practical claim follows from the whole argument: exact theory creates its own practice.