Kelsen on Natural Law and Legal Science

Kelsen rejects the scientific character of natural-law doctrine. For Kelsen, value judgments are ultimately not rationally justified but a matter of emotions. They can be rationally justified only relative to a certain moral or legal order. Kelsen also rejects the assumption of natural-law doctrines that value is immanent in reality. On the other hand, he suggests that legal science is possible regarding positive law, which is converted into a normative order by presupposing a “basic norm”. I will not challenge Kelsen’s critique of traditional natural-law doctrine, but discuss two issues: Can Kelsen’s own account of the “Pure Theory of Law” claim to be scientific, and does Kelsen’s critique of traditional natural-law theories affect modern versions of normative theories of law?