A study on Hans Kelsen's Legal thought

Hans Kelsen was not only a very great jurist but he possessed of exceptional personality. During his life, Kelsen devoted a considerable attention to the issues like as the maintenance of peace, international matters, and the nature and concept of law. He sought to describe law as separate from both ethics and ideology. Kelsen's legal positivism is of some features as follows:1. it is free from any ethical or ideological issues;2. in his theory no value judgment is made concerning the legal system per se;3. all historical, sociological and ethical issues are beyond the scope of this theory;4. this theory is set up first by making a fundamental distinction between the prescriptive and the descriptive aspects of positive law;5. Kelsen separated the validity from the efficacy; in his view, the validity means that there is norm or legal order, and the validity of the legal norms within any system stems from a basic and fundamental norm;6. Kelsen's theory redounds to some unity between international and national law, between objective and subjective law, and between the state and the law.