In the texts gathered here, Ingeborg Maus addresses a paradox of democracy: on one hand, citizens place great trust in the judiciary, particularly the constitutional court, while parliament ranks at the bottom of the trust scale. However, when constitutional norms are dissolved into vague values that allow for the circumvention of constitutionally compliant laws, the court appears, on the other hand, as an opponent of popular sovereignty. The critique of this legal practice, which can also be observed at the EU level today, is complemented by a retrospective on the methods of the Nazi judiciary.