Hans Kelsen arrived in the United States in 1940. He was, in the words of Roscoe Pound, “undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time” (Pound 1934 : 532). When he left his position at the University of Vienna just a few years earlier, the Austrian politician and jurist Karl Renner hailed Kelsen as “the most original teacher of law of our time” (Métall 1969 : 59). And yet, when Kelsen arrived in the United States, he was not able to fi nd a permanent teaching position at a U.S. law school. In the end, he took a position in the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Political Science . He taught, lectured and published in the United States until his death in 1973. After World War II, Kelsen taught and/or held visiting professorships abroad, but also at U.S. universities, and he received honorary degrees from Harvard, Chicago, and Berkeley (Ladavac 1998 : 392). However, while Kelsen continues to play a large role in legal education, in jurisprudence and in international legal theory in other parts of the world (Walter et al. 2010 ), 1 he is almost completely unknown in the legal academy and the legal profession in the United States (Telman 2010 : 353). Moreover, Kelsen remains an obscure fi gure in other parts of the U.S. academy, such as political science , international relations , sociology and political philosophy, despite his extensive writings on those topics and the signifi cant international reception of his ideas in those fi elds as well (Aliprantis and Olechowski 2014 ).