Vienna visit for Professor Prebble and Law Honours student
Law Honours student Hanneke van Oeveren and Professor John Prebble recently spent time in Vienna discussing jurisprudence with Director of the Hans Kelsen-Institut, Professor Clemens Jabloner.
Law Honours student Hanneke van Oeveren and Professor John Prebble recently spent time in Vienna discussing jurisprudence with Director of the Hans Kelsen-Institut, Professor Clemens Jabloner.
Hanneke won a Victoria University of Wellington Summer Scholarship in 2014 to write an index to Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law with Professor Prebble. Pure Theory of Law is possibly the leading text on analytical legal philosophy published in the Twentieth Century. Hanneke and Professor Prebble met with Professor Jabloner to discuss the index and a proposed index to Kelsen’s collection of essays, What is Justice? Like Pure Theory of Law, the English version of What is Justice? has never had an index, omissions that make both books less accessible to scholars and students than they should be.
While in Vienna, Professor Prebble also delivered a lecture at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien on “Kelsenian Perspetives of Income Tax Law”, with a commentary by Professor Jabloner. The lecture was sponsored by the Hans Kelsen-Institut and the Institut für Österreichisches und Internationales Steuerrecht (Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law).
Professor Prebble’s theme was that in Kelsenian terms, income tax law hardly qualifies as law at all, in that important norms of income tax law (1) operate by degrees, rather than absolutely, and (2) do not satisfy the canonical form of the legal norm as defined by Kelsen, namely that “If fact X obtains then consequence Y ought to follow”. The argument is that income tax law cannot define X by factual tests and instead resorts to legal tests, which make any conclusion circular.
Professor Jabloner, a former President of the Austrian Administrative Court, has recently been in the news in his role as Chairman of the Historical Commission of the Republic of Austria, which investigates claims for the return of property looted by the Nazis, notably including the Klimt portrait, “Woman in Gold”, which was the subject of the film of the same name that was released in February 2015.
The 2015-2016 summer scholarship to write an index to What is Justice? Was won by Nina Opacic, who will start work after the 2015 final examinations.