The Juristocratic State

Abstract

The book analyses the processes by which a democracy-based state is increasingly transformed into a juristocratic basis in a number of countries in the Western world and by their impulse elsewhere in the world too. This is essentially created by the wider and wider competences on the constitutional courts, but the change of the decision-making process of the other supreme courts also shows this direction. What has been politically debated within the democratically elected bodies in a state of democracy – millions of masses cast their votes in order to determine the direction in which these issues should be resolved – it is based in the uristocratic state on the struggle with legal arguments, and the final decisions are made by the supreme court or constitutional court. The analysis also shows that this state operation has not only become popular in a number of countries around the world but it has also a special legitimacy base for this. Apart from some share-outs in the principles of democracy, the justification of the state’s decisions are always made – with fewer or more chains of reasoning – by deduction from the Constitution. This special legitimacy makes it a top priority for examining how the decision-making processes of the constitutional court actually take place and whether there are structural distortions in deriving these decisions from the Constitution. The analyses show seven such distortions; in the last chapter of the book, some modalities for refinements are analysed. It is stated that by these refinements the juristic decision-making processes will be more appropriate to match this legitimacy promise. On the other hand, the analysis suggests that even if we admit the state’s juristocratic base, we still have to strive to at least partially fasten it back to the principles of democracy.