Juristocracy Béla Pokol (1950 ?) is a professor of law and a Judge of the
Constitutional Court. He was an MP between 1998 and 2002. He has a wide teaching
activity and published more than forty books. The book analyzes the processes by
which democratic states are increasingly transformed into ones of a
juristocratic nature in a number of countries in the Western world. This is
essentially created by the wider and wider competences of constitutional courts.
In the juristocratic state the final decisions are made by the supreme court or
constitutional court. The constitutional courts are at the center of these
developments, and thus the book's analysis starts with an examination of the
changes by which the originally limited constitutional courts were transformed
into chief organs of the state. The book removes the taboos over the research of
the creation of the German Basic Law and shows that the path towards
ever-growing constitutional courts has been created by the occupying U.S.
military government explicitly in order to limit democracy. This later became
the beginning of the juristocratic state. This state operation has a special
legitimacy base. Apart from some share-out in the principles of democracy, the
justification of the state's decisions is here that these decisions are always
made 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.