The article aims to analyze the main aspects that characterize the procedure of concluding the plea agreements, concluded between the prosecutor and the defendant, within the proceedings before international criminal courts. The fact that these courts have taken features from both legal systems, inquisitorial and accusatorial, as well as the fact that this procedure has been implemented in a stage subsequent to the adoption of the statutes of these courts, for reasons of practical necessity, makes their experience of over 12 years in implementing this procedure particularly useful to the European continental legal systems which, in their large majority, have recently adopted the Plea Agreement procedure. These also include Romania, once the „Plea Agreement” institution has been regulated within the provisions of Articles 478–488 of the new Criminal Procedure Code, which makes the study of the case-law of the international criminal courts also useful in the Romanian judicial practice.

The penal clause originates in the principle of contractual freedom. According to this principle, the parties are free to conclude any contracts and to determine their contents, within the limits imposed by the law, the public order and the morality (Article 1169 of the new Civil Code). This study examines the penal clause from a historical perspective, starting from the Roman law, continuing with the French canon law, the Civil Code of 1864, and then reaching to the new Civil Code, as well as the definition of the penal clause, the object, the advantages and the disadvantages of including the penal clause into contracts. The study also makes an analysis of the penal clause in comparison to other institutions of civil law, by emphasizing the similarities and the differences.

Criminal regulations are lacunary as regards the punishment of the actions of some persons to determine, by corruption or by other means, ordered assassinations or other serious offences, although their activity is extremely dangerous, taking into account the fact that, sometimes, the victims escape only owing to the benevolence of those instigated, which, in some cases, even denounce the instigators.

The person entitled to succession is the person that has the freedom to choose between the acquiring of the title of heir, by accepting the succession, and the denial of such quality, by waiver. The two sides of the successoral option – acceptance of inheritance and waiver of inheritance – both in their sense of subjective rights and in the sense of legal acts must be appreciated and understood in correlation with other notions and institutions, in the first place of the law of succession, and also belonging to other matters of civil law. In this context, there are presented some aspects of regulating the successoral option, which have been interpreted otherwise by doctrine or which have the potential for controversy, among others, as a result of shortcomings in phrasing of some texts of the Civil Code or by failing to observe some relationships they have, as mentioned above, with other legal notions and institutions.

This study provides a detailed and systemic analysis of the provisions of Article 358 of the Civil Code referring to the partition of common assets jointly owned by the spouses during the community matrimonial regimes. More specifically, it is analysed the possibility to extend the provisions of Article 358 of the Civil Code also over the partition of per-shares common assets of spouses, as well as the applicability of the provisions of Articles 669–686 of the Civil Code within this partition. Likewise, there are distinguished the elements of continuity and those of novelty of the present regulation, referring to the partition of jointly owned common assets during the community matrimonial regimes, in relation to the regulation previously established by Article 36 (2) of the Family Code. Finally, there are expressed some critical opinions in connection with the provisions of Article 36 of the Law No 71/2011 implementing the Law No 287/2009 on the Civil Code referring to the application in time of the provisions of Article 358 of the Civil Code.

In this paper we intend to determine if the legal regime applicable to the superficies consisting in the right to build on the land of another is different from that prescribed for the superficies established on an existing building. Although it defines it in Article 693 (1), as a form of the right of superficies, the Civil Code does not contain provisions with special reference to the exercise of the superficies consisting in the right to build. Only in the event of ending of this special superficies due to the expiry of its duration, Article 699 (1) and (2) of the Civil Code provides for a regime derogating from the general rules of artificial real estate accession. In these circumstances, the powers of the superficiary who acquired the right to build on the land of another were indirectly inferred from the restrictive provisions contained in Article 695 (2) of the Civil Code, applicable to the superficies established on an existing building. The conclusion we reached is that, when superficies takes the form of the right to build, the superficiary enjoys a preferential treatment compared to that applied to the one who has acquired a superficies on existing buildings. This regime remains favorable in case of ending of the right of superficies due to the expiry of its duration, based on the special rules derogating from the general ones regulating artificial real estate accession established as a result of the ending of the superficies. The common rules applicable to both forms of the right of superficies were not tackled in this paper.