Expertise is the activity of research of certain facts or circumstances of the case, which requires specialized knowledge, activity carried out by an expert or, in the cases provided by law, by a specialist in a specific field, designated by the court at the request of the parties or ex officio, and whose findings and/or conclusions are reported in a written document, called an expertise report. As such, the expertise and the expertise report are two interdependent operations, since the expertise report is the follow-up of the expertise, its final act, and the expertise is the research activity on which the expertise report is based. Although the legislator establishes that the evidence can be provided, among others, by means of the „expertise” (Article 250, Articles 330–340 of the Civil Procedure Code), which constitutes the means of proof, from a legal point of view, is the expertise report, and not the expertise itself.
The expertise can only concern factual circumstances on which the expert is asked to give clarifications or to ascertain them, circumstances which require specialized knowledge and which help to solve the case. The legal norms cannot form the object of the expertise, because the judges must know the law in force in Romania. However, the content of the foreign law is established by the court of law through „attestations obtained from the state bodies that have enacted it”, by „expertise opinion” or by another appropriate way [Article 2562 (1) of the Civil Code].
