Rule of Law – Contesting and Contested

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 learning processes between nations and ages are also involved—is a mere artificial projection, which conceals the Westʼs 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.(Budapest: Ferenc Mádl Institute of Comparative Law 2021) 408 [ISBN 978-615-6356-02-4 & ISBN 978-615-6356-03-1 (eBook)] Preface /// BASICS: ʻRechtsstaatlichkeitʼ and ʻRule of Lawʼ: Divergent Paths of a Correlated Ideal // OUTLOOKS: Hyperrationality Standing for Anarchy in America (A Case Study on the Pattern of the Judicial Mind) / In Want of New Balances in Transition: Lithuania Searching for Its Own Path / Global Changes and Challenges to Law: Immutability and Mutability in Law // TRANSITION: Rule of Law: Imperfectly Realized, or Perfected without Realization? / Rule of Law – At the Crossroads of Challenges / Transition Marshaled by Constitutional Court Dicta under the Cover of Rule of Law (A Case study of Hungary) / The Revolution of 1956 in the Judgment of Ethics and Law (Or the Responding Ability of Law as a Post-totalitarian Dilemma / ʻFight for Lawʼ (Lessons from our Constitutional Debates) // Bordering Issues I: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: The Challenge by the Taxi Blockade / Indivisibility of the Law and Rule of Law / Civil Disobedience: Pattern with no Standard? / Crossroads of Civil Obedience and Disobedience (A Moment of Constitutional Impotence in Hungary) // Bordering Issues II: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST: On Setting Standards (Or the Dilemma in General) / The Right to Judge the Past (Or the Dilemma in Legal Particulars) / ʻRadical Evilʼ on Trial (On the Historical Setting, Political Aspects and Legal Conditions of Transitional Justice Facing the Crimes of Dictatorial Regimes) / Why Having Failed in Facing with the Past? / Coming to Terms with the Past under the Rule of Law / Retroactivity in Law /// Bordering Issues III: HUMAN RIGHTS / The Problematics of Human Rights /// PUZZLES AND THEORIES / Rule of Law, or the Dilemma of an Ethos: To be Gardened or Mechanized? / Transition in Hungary, Or What to Learn for Future Transformations? / Ideal or Idol? Traps in Understanding the Rule of Law / Rule of Law, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, État de Droit – Contesting and Contested /// Bibliography /// Index / Index of Sources of Law / Index of Name