ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the arguments about the legitimation of the law based state which were employed by the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. The Court's decisions include extensive passages concerning the nature of democratic legitimacy and, surprisingly, attack the concept of formal rational legality, a concept which one might have thought it would regard as appropriate for its own legitimation. The Constitutional Court's references to the natural rights of man or its attempts to define liberal democratic morals and politics were motivated by the Court's recognition of difficulty of the complexity of the political, constitutional and social transformation of the Czech Republic and other post-communist societies at the beginning of the 90s. The Court had to resolve the technical relationship between the criminal law concept of responsibility and the responsibility for political crimes orchestrated by the communist regime referred to in the Act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime and the Resistance Against It.
