| Robert Alexy | |
| Birth Date: | 9 September 1945 |
| Birth Place: | Oldenburg, Germany |
| Nationality: | German |
| Alma Mater: | University of Göttingen |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Ralf Dreier |
| Doctoral Students: | Mattias Kumm |
| Field: | Law |
| Work Institution: | University of Kiel |
| Prizes: | Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2010) |
Robert Alexy (born 9 September 1945 in Oldenburg, Germany) is a jurist and a legal philosopher.
Alexy studied law and philosophy at the University of Göttingen. He received his J.D. in 1976 with the dissertation A Theory of Legal Argumentation, and he achieved his Habilitation in 1984 with a Theory of Constitutional Rights.
He is a professor at the University 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 the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.[3]
Since 2008 the Universities of Alicante, Buenos Aires, Tucumán, Antwerp, National University of San Marcos in Lima, Prague, Coimbra, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Chapecó, Rio de Janeiro and Bogotá awarded him the honorary doctorate degree.[4]
Alexy's definition of law looks like a mix of Kelsen's normativism (which was an influential version of legal positivism) and Radbruch's legal naturalism (Alexy, 2002), but Alexy's theory of argumentation (Alexy, 1983) puts him very close to legal interpretivism.
In The 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.