»Rechtswidriges Recht«

Who decides whether legal rulings are actually lawful and with what consequences? This question, which can be stylised as the problem of »unlawful law«, divided minds within the Vienna School of Jurisprudence around Hans Kelsen and formed the core of a bitter controversy between two of his most gifted students, Adolf Julius Merkl and Fritz Sander. This polemic (ca. 1918-1930), in its idea-historical and legal-theoretical facets, is the subject of the present work, which sees itself as a polemography.