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Robert Alexy | |
|---|---|
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| Born | (1945-09-09)9 September 1945 (age 80) |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Awards | Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2010) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Law |
| Institutions | University of Kiel |
| Doctoral advisor | Ralf Dreier |
| Doctoral students | Mattias Kumm |
Robert Alexy (born 9 September 1945 inOldenburg,Germany) is ajurist and alegal philosopher.
Alexy studiedlaw andphilosophy at theUniversity of Göttingen. He received his J.D. in 1976 with the dissertationA Theory of Legal Argumentation, and he achieved hisHabilitation in 1984 with aTheory of Constitutional Rights.
He is a professor at theUniversity of Kiel[1] and in 2002 he was appointed to the Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the University of Göttingen.[2] In 2010 he was awarded theOrder of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.[3]
Since 2008 the Universities ofAlicante,Buenos Aires,Tucumán,Antwerp,National University of San Marcos in Lima,Prague,Coimbra, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Chapecó, Rio de Janeiro andBogotá awarded him the honorary doctorate degree.[4]
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Alexy'sdefinition oflaw looks like a mix ofKelsen'snormativism (which was an influential version oflegal positivism) andRadbruch'slegal naturalism (Alexy, 2002), but Alexy'stheory of argumentation (Alexy, 1983) puts him very close tolegal interpretivism.
InThe Argument From Injustice, Alexy defends Radbruch's formula that injust or evil laws only lose their legal validity when they deliberately disavow justice and equality. He formulated law's relationship to morality on three theses:
At the heart of his theory is the claim to correctness: Law must necessarily claim to be correct, no matter how corrupt, lest it be self-contradictory and fundamentally illogical. As law coerces behaviour and gives individuals decisive reasons for acting, the correctness it claims must also be moral.
