Justice as Social Superego

With the texts gathered in this volume, Ingeborg Maus aims at a paradox of democracy: on the one hand, citizens place great trust in the judiciary, especially the Constitutional Court, while parliament ranks at the bottom of the trust scale. On the other hand, when constitutional norms are dissolved into indeterminate »values« that allow even constitutionally compliant laws to be undermined, the court appears as an adversary of popular sovereignty. The critique of this legal practice, which can also be observed at the EU level today, is complemented by a look back at the methods of Nazi justice.