partner to the state Separation of powers, with the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government limiting one another's power and providing for checks and balances The judicature and the executive are bound by law (not acting against the law), and the legislature is bound by constitutional principles Both the legislature and democracy itself are bound by elementary constitutional rights and principles Transparency of state acts and the requirement of providing a reason for all state acts Review of state decisions and state acts by independent organs, including an appeal process Hierarchy of laws and the requirement of clarity and definiteness Reliability of state actions, protection of past dispositions made in good faith against later state actions, prohibition of retroactivity Principle of the proportionality of state action Russian model of Rechtsstaat: a concept of the legal state The Russian legal system, borne out of transformations in the 19th century under the reforms of Emperor Alexander II, is based primarily on the German legal tradition. It was from here that Russia borrowed a doctrine of Rechtsstaat, which literally translates as "legal state". The concept of "legal state" () is a fundamental (but undefined) principle that appears in the very first dispositive provision of Russia's post-Communist constitution: "The Russian Federation – Russia – constitutes a democratic federative legal state with a republican form of governance." Similarly, the first dispositive provision of Ukraine's Constitution declares: "Ukraine is a sovereign and independent, democratic, social, legal state." The effort to give meaning to the expression "legal state" is anything but theoretical. Valery Zorkin, President of the Constitutional Court of Russia, wrote in 2003: The Russian concept of legal state adopted many elements of constitutional economics. Constitutional economics is a field of economics and constitutionalism that describes and analyzes the specific interrelationships between constitutional issues and functioning of the economy, including the budget process. The term "constitutional economics" was used by American economist James M. Buchanan as a name for a new academic sub-discipline that in 1986 brought him the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his "development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making." According to Buchanan, the ethic of constitutionalism is a key for constitutional order and "may be called the idealized Kantian world" where the individual "who is making the ordering, along with substantially all of his fellows, adopts the moral law as a general rule