In real life, Professor Balthazar is one of South Africa's foremost legal minds. He chooses to remain anonymous, so it doesn't interfere with his daily duties.

Although South Africa remains a constitutional democracy, legal autocrats are menacingly moving to centre stage, exploiting the law to subvert the very constitutional enterprise and meet their own populist purposes.

A pandemic of authoritarian legalism has broken out in recent years. Hungary, Poland, India and Brazil are clear examples of how legalistic autocrats exploit their democratically elected positions to develop a narrative that equates the majority vote to an official mandate to act on behalf of the citizens of the country.

Independent courts are co-opted to install "party-friendly" judges who are ready to approve laws that defer to the government and reject those that do not pass the government's ideological muster.

Increasingly, law is employed by these autocrats to consolidate their regimes while seeking to maintain a form of legitimacy that masks their behaviour under the pretence of law-abiding democracy.

Numerous studies have shown that the growth of autocratic rule under a form of autocratic legalism is difficult to discern initially because it often takes the form of an incremental process as autocrats slowly...