The recent rise of populism and illiberalism in Europe and beyond has prompted scepticism about the inevitability of the liberal consensus and the necessary interconnection of free markets along with constitutionalism and democracy. It has also raised questions regarding the long-term legacies of authoritarian legal thought and practice in East Central Europe. The contributions in this issue aim to situate the revolutionary changes ushered in by the events of 1989 into the longer history of how state socialist systems evolved in the post-war era. They demonstrate that the processes of transformation in the 1990s did not come about from a Stunde Null moment in which the socialist past was cleared away, making way entirely for a liberal future. Law, constitutionalism and neo-liberalism were not simply imported and transplanted from the West through a ‘catching up revolution’. Instead, economic and legal experts paved the way for these developments from within the socialist system itself. Together these articles illuminate how law shaped the nature of authoritarian rule under communist dictatorship, how economic reforms could prompt legal reforms towards strictly authoritarian ends, how constitutional transformations were not the result of the natural unfolding of progress, but strongly ideological liberal projects, and how that resulted in some cases, such as Hungary and Poland, in distinctive ‘counter-constitutional’ projects.