This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The nineteenth-century Rechtsstaat that grew out of Prussian constitutional practice was, by design, a narrower idea than the one German constitutional law holds today. Its original concern was formal: were government acts authorized by properly enacted law, applied through regular, predictable procedure. It asked almost nothing about whether the content of that law was just. A state could pass discriminatory legislation through entirely regular parliamentary procedure, apply it through entirely regular administrative process, and still satisfy a purely formal Rechtsstaat, because formal legality does not ask what the law says, only whether it was validly made and evenly applied.
That gap is not a hypothetical one for German constitutional history. The National Socialist regime governed, for stretches of its rule, through law that had passed through recognizably legal enactment procedures, the Enabling Act of 1933 chief among them, while using that same formally lawful machinery to strip rights, property and eventually life from entire categories of people. The postwar drafters of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, adopted in 1949, wrote their constitution as a direct rejection of the idea that formal legality alone was ever an adequate safeguard. Article 20 names Rechtsstaat as one of five entrenched structural principles, but the postwar tradition reads it now as a material or substantive Rechtsstaat, one that requires state action to respect human dignity, proportionality and the substance of fundamental rights, not merely their form, and Article 79, paragraph 3, the Basic Law's own eternity clause, puts this principle, along with human dignity and the other four structural principles, beyond the reach of any future constitutional amendment, an extraordinary constitutional choice explicable only against the specific history that produced it.
That evolution, from a formal doctrine about lawful procedure to a substantive doctrine about lawful content, is one comparative constitutional lawyers point to often, because it shows a legal tradition consciously rebuilding one of its own foundational concepts in direct response to that concept's own catastrophic failure. It is also a useful corrective to any reader tempted to treat Rechtsstaat as simply the German word for rule of law. The rule of law, in its classic Diceyan form, never went through an equivalent public reckoning with its own formalism; Rechtsstaat, by the middle of the twentieth century, was forced to.