Since the establishment of the Constitutional Court of Turkey (CCT) in 1961, the Turkish judiciary has played an unusually active role in some of the most contested questions of Turkish politics. Rather than deepening democracy, however, the judiciary in general, and the Constitutional Court in particular, have played a critical gatekeeping role that barred socialist, Islamist, and Kurdish movements from renegotiating the basic tenets of the Constitution. Beyond guarding the boundaries of legitimate public discourse through narrow interpretations of secularism and national identity, the Court, in alliance with several other unelected institutions, also maintained a democracy in which institutions with ultimate veto power were immune to contestation or infiltration by non-Kemalist groups, although such groups could participate in elections and civil society. Since the rise to power of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), the role of the judiciary as the ultimate gatekeeper of secularism has come under strain. Through a series of measures grounded in democratic legitimacy, AKP dismantled the secular veto structure that “contained” non-Kemalist politics. In this paper, I examine AKP’s crackdown on the secular judiciary and its redeployment of ‘legalism’ against secularists and Kurdish activists. Through a case study of two mass trials (Ergenekon and KCK) with which AKP “struck” back at Kemalists and Kurdish activists, I examine the ways in which AKP’s use of law departs from Kemalist legalism as secularist veto point, while consolidating a novel power structure.