Collection of eight letters of Austrian émigré jurist Hans Kelsen, 1956-1966

Seven handwritten and one typewritten letter from philosopher and jurist Hans Kelsen to Ernest Marcus, 1956-1966, a fellow German-speaking exile, originally from Breslau who, like Kelsen, fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. While generally brief, Kelsen's letters include details regarding his reading of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, as well as the diaries of Robert Musil. Nine pages of correspondence from Kelsen in total, with Marcus' typewritten notes on Musil stapled to the matching letter, and a retained draft of one of his letters to Kelsen.

Kelsen is considered one of the foremost legal philosophers of the twentieth century, known primarily for his positivist pure theory of law (Reine Rechtslehre), his opposition to fellow German-speaking jurist Carl Schmitt, and his work on the postwar Austrian constitution. Manuscript material by Kelsen is scarce, both in commerce and in institutional collections.