Rechtsstaat (German: Rechtsstaat, Dutch: Rechtsstaat) is a doctrine in continental European legal thinking, originally borrowed from German jurisprudence, that can be translated as "legal state", "state of law", "state of justice", "state of rights", or "state based on justice and integrity".It is a "constitutional state" in which the exercise of governmental power is constrained by the law, and is often tied to the Anglo-American concept of the rule of law, but differs from it in that it also emphasizes what is just (i.e., a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity).