ABSTRACT
This chapter discuses whether Ivan Žolger can be seen as a (r)evolutionary in the two senses of Dean Pitamic’s inaugural lecture conceptualised as “the inner type” and “the outer type” of revolution, due to Žolger’s rather sui generis highest administrative as well as academic roles in the constitutional reform processes of two consecutive political entities, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. In conclusion, it is shown how, at least twice, Žolger was given by the Emperor the soon-to-be proverbial Pitamic’s “sword to wield at the existing constitution”, which is the very meaning of legal revolution adopted by the Viennese circle of Hans Kelsen. It is further shown that especially as the founder and head of the Staatsrechtliches Department in the old state, then later at the Paris peace conference as one of only four plenipotentiaries for the new one, as well as an academic and author of Österreichisches Verordnungsrecht (1898), Das staatsrechtliche Ausgleich zwischen Österreich und Ungarn (1911) and Der Hofstaat des Hauses Österreich (1917), Žolger lived “at the edge of meaning” (J. B. White), by envisaging and co-creating several possible parallel worlds as potential legal spaces.
