Descriere
The constitutional formula enshrined in Article 1 (3) of the Romanian Constitution, invoking „the spirit of the democratic traditions of the Romanian people”, poses a challenging epistemological puzzle, i.e., how can a legal order ground its legitimacy in a tradition that lacks real institutional practice? The article addresses the question by combining comparative law theories on law as a cultural phenomenon (Sacco, Legrand, Graziadei, Cotterrell) with H. Patrick Glen’s conception of tradition as normative information, proposing that the constitutional reference functions not as a descriptive statement but as a teleological legal fiction whose validity depends on a criterion of falsifiability, understood, on a general note, as the capacity of the constitutional system to identify and sanction deviations from its own democratic commitments.
The empirical sections offer a bird’s-eye-view analysis, proceeding historically through the transplant of the Belgian constitutional model in 1866, the ambivalent legacy of the 1923 Constitution,
a brief acknowledgment of the paradoxical preservation of democratic normative data under communist rule (1947-1989), the reactivation of certain cryptotypes within the post-1991 political framework, the constitutional crises of 2012 and 2017, the rule-of-law tensions with European institutions (2021-2022), the instrumentalization of magistrates’ pension reform (2026), and the
annulment of the 2024 presidential elections.
