Law does obviously not benefit from the privilege of having its own exhaustive language. We might say that most concepts used in law are borrowed from other branches of knowledge. The quite rare concepts that are its own often do not receive a definition that can be classified, according to the methodology of the act of definition itself, as “legal”. The amalgamation of legal terminology with the economic, political, sociological or philosophical terminology, without revising the concepts and without their clear understanding in the areas of knowledge from where they come makes the doctrine and the case law too often flat and stereotyped, if not even chaotic from the conceptual point of view. Lawyers are no longer seen as persons of learning, who try to explain the nature of things through justice, but as simple technicians, who apply concepts taken from other social-human sciences. Under these conditions, one of the fundamental problems for lawyers is to explain a fact that seems to be overlooked by our current culture: what is meant by a legal concept? Afterward, it becomes equally important to understand the way in which the non-legal concepts used in law should be revised, namely what the standards of the legal definition of concepts are. The above-mentioned article attempts to answer to these challenges.

Over time, the abuse of right has been interpreted in various ways: while the advocates of absolute rights have interpreted it literally, namely as the almightiness of individual rights, the advocates of relative rights claim that the rights of one person end where the rights of another person start, so that the person excessively using its own right commits an abuse of right. As regards the explanation of its punishment, the classical theory assimilates it to tort liability, based on the moral censorship of conduct. Meanwhile, more and more of its hypotheses have become detached from fault. The new Romanian Civil Code accepts these trends partially, still remaining the prisoner of fault, as a basis for civil liability. The above-mentioned study intends to examine in a critical manner the legal solutions provided by the new regulation, trying to explain the punishment of the abuse of right on other ideas than the requirement to punish the guilty conduct of the holder.

By the Government Emergency Ordinance no. 51/2008 regarding the legal public aid in civil matters, the Romanian lawmaker transposed the European Union Council Directive no. 2003/8/EC of 27 January 2003 in this matter. In the above-mentioned study, the author discusses – also in relation to the cases appearing before the courts – the following matters: – The elements taken into consideration when applying the applicant’s material situation; – The jurisdiction to solve the application for legal public aid in the form of exemption from, reduction etc. of the judicial stamp duty established in the appeal as the debts for the merits of the case; – The actual procedure of providing the legal aid in the form of legal assistance through a lawyer.