Constitutional Law
8
Aalt Willem Heringa
8.1 State Power Established
8.1.1 Introduction
Law and StateThe law is strongly connected to the state, on one hand, because
the state creates most of the law and, on the other hand, because the state itself is
regulated by the law. From a historical point of view, it was the increasingly
effective and tightly organized state (whether it was a city-state, a principality, a
kingdom, or an empire) that succeeded in imposing law upon its citizens. This trend
is illustrated by the development of criminal law as a separate branch of law, next to
private law. By prosecuting crimes as offenses against the state (and monopolizing
violence and the suppression of crimes) rather than considering them offenses
against the victims, states drastically reduced the rates of violence between individ-
ual people, clans, and tribes. With this enforced pacification and improved legal
certainty, as well as with growing infrastructure, states boosted productivity and
facilitated peaceful commerce between people. At the same time, we expect that the
state itself be organized and regulated by the law and that rulers exercise their
power in accordance with legal norms, rather than arbitrarily.
The branch of law that regulates the state itself is calledconstitutional law.
Constitutional law contains rules on the organization of a state, on the powers that
its organs possess, and on the relations between these organs (institutional law), and
it provides fundamental rights that protect the legal position of the individual
against the state (human rights law, judicial review, and, as an offspring, adminis-
trative law).
A.W. Heringa (*)
Constitutional and Administrative Law, Montesquieu Institute, Maastricht University,
Maastricht, The Netherlands
e-mail:[email protected]
J. Hage and B. Akkermans (eds.),Introduction to Law,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-06910-4_8,#Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
157