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Contents

PREFACE
BASICS
'Rechtsstaatlichkeit' and 'Rule of Law': Divergent Paths of a Correlated Ideal (1993)
  1. 'Rechtsstaatlichkeit' and 'Rule of Law'
  2. Rechtsstaatlichkeit and Rule of Law as Variations
  3. The Role of Conceptual Generality

OUTLOOKS
Hyperrationality Standing for Anarchy in America (A Case Study on the Pattern of the Judicial Mind) (2002)
  1. The Background
  2. The American Scene
  3. Conclusion
In Want of New Balances in Transition: Lithuania Searching for Its Own Path (2004)
  1. Transitology Questioned
  2. Lithuania
  3. A Call For Local Experience Assessed
Global Changes and Challenges to Law: Immutability and Mutability in Law (2013)
  1. Introduction
  2. Challenges in Need of a Direct Response
  3. New Dimensions of Law
  4. Changes in Law
  5. New Paradigm in Understanding Social Order

TRANSITION
Rule of Law: Imperfectly Realized, or Perfected without Realization? (2000)
  1. Declarations
  2. Question marks
Rule of Law - At the Crossroads of Challenges (2002)
  1. Law: Values & Techniques
  2. Human-centeredness and Practical Orientation
  3. Theological and Anthropological Foundations
  4. An Irreplaceably Own Task
  5. Recapitulation
  6. A Final Remark in Comparison
Transition Marshaled by Constitutional Court Dicta under the Cover of Rule of Law (A Case study of Hungary) (2006)
  1. Transitions in the Age of Globalization
  2. Constitutional Assessment: The Hungarian Way
  3. Example: Human Dignity in Isolation and Sterility
  4. Public Law Privatized with the State Targeted as the Common Enemy
  5. A Future without Past
  6. Legality with Justice Silenced: Crimes Unpunished
  7. Rule of Constitutional Court Dicta, not of Law
  8. A Self-image in Reverse
The Revolution of 1956 in the Judgment of Ethics and Law (Or the Responding Ability of Law as a Post-totalitarian Dilemma (2006)
  1. Law and Socio-ethical Foundations
  2. The Sine Qua Non of an Ethical Minimum in Law
  3. 1956s Drama in Hungary
  4. The Law Silenced Afterward
'Fight for Law' (Lessons from our Constitutional Debates) (2011)
  1. 'Twenty Years of Freedom in Central Europe'
  2. Globalism? Cosmopolitanism?
  3. Do we Need New Law? Do we Need a New Constitution?
  4. Has our 'Transition to Rule of Law' so far Proved to be a Dead End?
  5. So what is the Concept of Law that is so Persistently Inculcated in Us?

BORDERING ISSUES I: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
The Challenge by the Taxi Blockade (1991)
  1. What is Law?
  2. What is the Law's Message for a Given Situation?
  3. Law and its tertium non datur
  4. Legal Assessments are to be Heard
Indivisibility of the Law and Rule of Law (1991)
Civil Disobedience: Pattern with no Standard? (1991)
  1. The Background
  2. The Task
  3. Civil Disobedience
Crossroads of Civil Obedience and Disobedience (A Moment of Constitutional Impotence in Hungary) (2007)
  1. Civil Disobedience
  2. Civil Obedience

BORDERING ISSUES II: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST
On Setting Standards (Or the Dilemma in General (1990)
  1. Intellectual Climate and Arguments in Favor
  2. Strategic Ends and Considerations of Principles
  3. A Legal Solution?
The Right to Judge the Past (Or the Dilemma in Legal Particulars) (1990)
  1. Law is Law
  2. Law is Continued
  3. Rule of Law as a New Base
  4. Rule of Law in Exceptional Situations
  5. The Case of a State Non-abiding by its Law
  6. The Variety of Paths and Ways in Law
'Radical Evil' on Trial (On the Historical Setting, Political Aspects and Legal Conditions of Transitional Justice Facing the Crimes of Dictatorial Regimes) (2002)
  1. The Quest
  2. Historical Background
  3. Normative Dimensions
  4. The Turn of Ideas
  5. Conclusion
Why Having Failed in Facing with the Past? (2003)
Coming to Terms with the Past under the Rule of Law (2009)
  1. When a Criminal Past is over
  2. "Radical Evil on Trial"
  3. Attempts at Resolution in Hungary
  4. Constitutional Counterrevolution
  5. Perspectives?
Retroactivity in Law (1999)
  1. Preliminaries
  2. Neutrality of Legal Techniques

BORDERING ISSUES III: HUMAN RIGHTS
The Problematics of Human Rights (2013)
  1. Historical Outline of Human Rights
  2. The Foundation of Human Rights
  3. The Nature of Human Rights
  4. The Universality and/or Particularity of Human Rights
  5. Conclusion

PUZZLES AND THEORIES
Rule of Law, or the Dilemma of an Ethos: To be Gardened or Mechanized? (2007)
  1. Models of Post-dictatorship Transition: US Patterns and Understanding of the Rule of Law
  2. Rule of Law: Universal vs. Particular
  3. Risk of Transfers and Impositions
  4. Circus Trainer and Gardener Approaches to Target Laws
  5. From Nihilism to Fetishism in Constitutionalism Reviewed: German and Hungarian, Post-WWII and Post-communism Types
Transition in Hungary, Or What to Learn for Future Transformations? (2014)
  1. Introduction: On the Call for Early Pre-planning
  2. The Assumption
  3. Post-WWII and Post-communist Models
  4. The Hungarian Case of System Transformation
  5. Conclusion
  6. Policy during the Process
Ideal or Idol? Traps in Understanding the Rule of Law (2015)
  1. The Mainstream US and EU Models
  2. The Genuine Message of the Rule of Law
  3. Moves under the Aegis of the Rule of Law
  4. The Genuine Issue: Who is to Master Whom
  5. Limited Commensurability of Legal Regimes
Rule of Law, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, État de Droit - Contesting and Contested (2021)
  1. Post-WWII Rebirth and Transformation into a Catchword
  2. Limitlessness in Today's Use
  3. Roots and Development in Various Legal Cultures
  4. The Genuine Content of their Referencing

BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INDEX OF SOURCES OF LAW
INDEX OF NAMES

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Blurb

The rule of law has become a watchword in international politics over the last few decades. It has been transformed from a descriptum into a prescriptum, a criterion for judging legal Orders, transferred from the legal to the political sphere. For Hungary, its impact coincided with the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the advance of globalization in our unipolar world. But what did not become, could not become, an operative term in law, since it is not linked to a definition of facts that would allow it to become legally ascertained and established as a set of facts constituting a legal case. Because, by its very nature, it is not a class concept with sharp boundaries, but a concept of order that can only be clarified by characterization and through examples. It is what literature calls essentially contested, and what institutions and authors are constantly expanding with competing formulations, which has long since led to its internal emptying out. In its origin and development, it has never been anything other than the accumulated experience of civilizational self-growth in the operation of the law by the state, which has evolved in responses to the challenges of various places and times. That is, it is particular. And the way in which our present attempts to universalize this - in which, of course, mutual leaming processes between nations and ages are also involved - is a mere artificial projection, which conceals the West's urge to export the values that guide it. Not a yes or no category, but an ideal towards which we strive. Contradictory, with compromises, because if we attempted to satisfy it in its entirety, the conflicting values within it could extinguish each other; consequently, only a case-by-case weighing up of these values can ensure that a balance, optimally satisfactory there and then, is achieved.

The volume contains the authors writings from three decades of searching for a way forward and a response.

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