This supremacy must create guarantees for implementation of his central idea: a permanent peaceful life as a basic condition for the happiness of its people and their prosperity.
The Legal state concept is based on the ideas, discovered by Immanuel Kant, for example, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: “The task of establishing a universal and permanent peaceful life is not only a part of theory of law within the framework of pure reason, but per se an absolute and ultimate goal.
To achieve this goal, a state must become the community of a large number of people, living provided with legislative guarantees of their property rights secured by a common constitution.
The supremacy of this constitution… must be derived a priori from the considerations for achievement of the absolute ideal in the most just and fair organization of people’s life under the aegis of public law.”.
Valery Zorkin, President of the Constitutional Court of Russia, wrote in 2003: “Becoming a legal state has long been our ultimate goal, and we have certainly made serious progress in this direction over the past several years.
This is in part because Marbury v. Madison, which established this judicial power in the early 19th century, has given the judiciary near-final authority on constitutional meaning.
If the judiciary—an unelected branch of government—can overturn popular legislation, then either there is a fundamental contradiction within the democratic system, or there is a tension that must be resolved by curbing judicial power.