Introduction: Constitutional Democracy and Constitutional Courts in the German States

In the initial chapter, the subject of the book is introduced, a preliminary overview is provided of the 16 state constitutional courts that exist in Germany, and an outline of the book is presented. The objective of this book is to pursue three basic goals: first, to describe the structures, functioning, and tasks of these state organs as well as their composition (descriptive objective); second, to place the state constitutional courts in the overall structure of the democratic constitutional and federal state of the Federal Republic of Germany (theoretical objective); and finally, to examine how well the state constitutional courts fulfill their tasks in the democratic constitutional and federal state (evaluative objective).