Legal Scholarship as design: A comment on Kammerhofer

In his interesting chapter, Kammerhofer argues in favour of Kelsen's pure legal theory as eminently suitable for the study of international law. He points out that this theory is about two separate objects. The first object is doctrinal legal scholarship; the second is law itself. For some readers, especially those trained in an Anglo-Saxon context, this two-fold task may come as a surprise. Isn't there a difference between on the one hand a philosophy of science (even if adapted to the special characteristics of legal scholarship) and on the other hand a philosophy of law? In my case, this question has a personal flavour. I myself was originally trained as a philosopher of science, and only later I turned to the philosophy of law. It was a transition to a completely different world, with different criteria and a different attitude towards its object.