ABSTRACT
The legitimacy of modern law has been a recurring theme both in legal sociological and in legal theoretical and philosophical debates. However, some interventions have attempted to efface legitimacy as an independent problem. In Kelsen's pure theory of law, the legitimacy of law was equated with its legality or - to put it in terms of validity - with its formal validity. There is some variation in KeJsen's definitions of legitimacy, but they all remain within the formal dimension of validity. In Kelsen's (1970, p. 209) view, 'the principle that a norm of the legal order is valid until its validity is terminated in a way determined by this legal order or until replaced by the validity of another norm of this order, is called the principle of legitimacy' .
