Legal Literacy - This article reviews and critiques Hans Kelsen's legal purification with his Pure Theory of Law. Let's take a look at the explanation regarding Hans Kelsen's legal purification from a sociological and ethical perspective below!

From Positivism to Formalism

The positivism school of thought initiated by Auguste Comte presented a revolutionary intellectual breakthrough in its time. The teachings he brought emphasized the existence of test parameters in the scientific field. The emphasis on these test parameters is oriented towards maintaining empirical facts from predictive assumptions and vague claims that cannot be proven true. Furthermore, he emphasized a strict separation of the scientific realm with the moral realm and religious realm, which is dogmatic.1

The paradigm that separates scientific elements from non-scientific elements, such as morality and religion, is constructed on the postulate that abstract ideas should not and cannot be united with concrete ideas. This paradigm was continued by legal philosophers with the formalism school of thought, which separates abstract values, including ethics and justice, from law as a concrete scientific field. This formalism school of thought, which is oriented towards the concretization of law, then emphasizes the existence of legal certainty even above justice. This is reflected in the three…