Law as a Leap of Faith

Abstract

This paper simultaneously pursues two comparisons: (1) a comparison between the religious believer's presupposition of God's existence and the lawyer's presupposition of the bindingness of the first constitution; and (2) a comparison between Soren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion and Hans Kelsen's philosophy of law. Altough both exercises throw up some important disanalogies, there are also many valuable lessons, especially concerning the intellectual fate of the tradition known as 'legal positivism'.