{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02053388090349076, 'fraction_numerical': 0.001026694045174538, 'mean_word_length': 4.942073170731708, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The essence and basic methods of the pure theory

Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law fascinates as many observers as it alienates. There certainly is a tendency to regard Kelsen’s theory as too structured, categorical, formalistic and unsuitable to the empiricism and alleged dislike for the abstract principle in common law jurisdictions. But English law is still a system consisting of rules prescribed by constitutionally established authorities, and it has to operate as a single coherent whole for its viability and legitimacy to be preserved, and for it to avoid dissolving into, or being seen as, a set of arbitrary prescriptions and procedures whose legitimacy could, at times, be questioned. This analysis requires the exposition of basic categories of pure theory as one of the most complex theories of the law, clarifying their essence, before the relevant matters arising in English law can be examined through the prism of this theory. The purity of legal method is meant as no more and no less than a consistent presentation of positivism, using only and exclusively the positivist legal method to explain the validity and content of legal norms, and distinguish these norms from social, political and ethical considerations that may historically or sociologically account for the creation of those legal norms. The basic task of the pure theory distinguishes this theory from all other legal theories. The pure theory ‘seeks to discover the nature of law itself, to determine its structure and its typical forms, independent of the changing content which it exhibits at different times and among different peoples’.1 Thus the ‘pure theory of law ... is a science, and not meta-physics. This science seeks the real and possible law, not the just, and in this sense it is radically realistic and empirical. It declines to justify or condemn.’2 The cognition and understanding of legal systems, not their assessment or critique, nor their