Rechtsstaat 's a concept in continental European legal thinking, originally borrowed from German jurisprudence, which literally means a "state of law" or a "state of rights". It's a "constitutional state" in which the exercise of governmental power's constrained by the law, and's often tied to the Anglo-American concept of the rule of law. In a Rechtsstaat, the power of the state's limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of authority. In a Rechtsstaat the citizens share… (More on Rechtsstaat)