János Kis in his study discusses the contemporary and current meaning of the 'Sólyom-thesis', the concept the President of the Constitutional Court elaborated in a 1992 decision of the Court on the prohibition of retroactive justice: 'the rule of law cannot be reinstated by violating the principle of the rule of law'. He concludes that the proper reading of the thesis is its normative one, which isn't the summary of a strict legalistic standpoint. It requires from the legislature to insist on the protection of the legality as long as possible, but does not exclude that this protection be overwritten by extraordinary circumstances.
In his essay, Csaba Győry provides an outline of a possible theoretical frame for the empirical, micro-level study of the application of the ideas of constitutionalism in everyday practices of professional organisations tasked with the application of the law, such as courts, the prosecution service and government bureocracies. After defining constitutionalism of the purposes of the study, the essay elaborates on the theoretical foundations of the approach. Thereafter, it concentrates on the transformation of the institutional frame that defines everyday action in Hungary from the late 1970s to the present.
In honour of László Sólyom, the first President of the Hungarian Constitutional Court, who died in October 2023 we asked authors, how realistic they think the expectations of the Court were about a liberal democratic constitutional change, a so-called 'rule of law revolution'. Another question was whether the lack of a constitutional culture that emerged after the democratic transition could possibly contributed to the process of autocratisation that began in 2010. Zoltán Balázs, Gábor Attila Tóth, László Majtényi, Gábor Halmai, Kriszta Kovács, Zsuzsa Szelényi and Viktor Kazai contributed to the discussion. We also publish the obituary of Professor Istvan Kukorelli, a former member of the Constitutional Court, on László Sólyom. ■
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