The paper deals with the correct interpretation of statutory provisions governing the written reproduction of audio or video conversations and communications intercepted and recorded, including those conducted in other language than Romanian. The author argues that it is imperative that legal practice accounts for matters dealt with in order to avoid abuses in this area, resulting in deprivation of effects of material drafted in breach of the law. There are also highlighted the main changes operated in this area by the new Code of Criminal Procedure.

Reopening the criminal trial in case of the judgment in the absence of the convicted person – an extraordinary means of appeal whose admissibility is subsumed to a set of conditions and requirements the fulfilment of which is meant to offer to the defendant the guarantee of a fair trial.

Under Article 1541 (1) b) of the new Romanian Civil Code, among the conditions in which the court may reduce the quantum of the penalty is also the condition that the penalty should be clearly excessive in relation to the damage that could be provided by the parties upon the conclusion of the contract. This text of the new Romanian Civil Code, which entered into force on 1 October 2011, has generated a controversy, in the sense that, once the „clearly excessive” character of the penalty has been retained, the court shall be required to proceed to the reduction thereof or, on the contrary, it has only a faculty (possibility) to proceed as such. In the opinion of the author of the study, the second interpretation is the judicial one.

Currently, the law governing the criminal clause institution are laid down in Articles 1538 to 1543 of the new Civil Code. What holds the special interest of the legal literature, and, in particular, that of practitioners, is the court’s possibility to reduce the criminal clause where the principal obligation has been executed by the debtor (creditor’s advantage) and where the penalty is clearly excessive in relation to the damage that could have been set out by the parties upon the contract conclusion. This study presents the legal, doctrinal and jurisprudential evolution of criminal clause reducibility.

Although the science and the practice of law have always enjoyed the consideration and the appreciation of society, their academic recognition remained, mostly, a desideratum. As a complex phenomenon: art, technics and science at the same time, the law represents complexity and difficulty in perceiving and affirming its status of scientific and cultural science. That is why, although the faculties of law were among the founding faculties of universities, the lawyers and their discipline came relatively late in the dome of academies. In Romania, the Romanian Academy, created in 1866, was initially concerned with the study of the national language and history, hardly opening its doors for sciences, in general, and social sciences, in particular. Facing this „conservatorism” the representatives of different sciences have opted to create some specialized academies, such as the Academy of Sciences (1936) or the Academy (Institute) of Moral and Political Sciences (1938). It was only in 1948, by creating the Division of legal and economic sciences, when the law received express recognition among the concerns of the high academic forum, but the lawyers are still under-represented within it. The increasing role of law in post-modern society and asserting its status as social complex science impose the revaluation of its academic status as well.

The codification is not only the expression of the political will of the legislator, but mainly a complex judicial technique of selecting and adjusting the normative content needed and adequate for a certain social, political, economic or institutional reality. As the constitution is a law, but it is rather differentiated from a law, the question to be raised shall consist in deciding what kind of legal rules it comprises. The settlement of this problem has to take into consideration the specificity of the fundamental law, but also the requirements of the codification theory. The establishment of the normative content of the constitution with all scientific rigor shall be indispensable, both for the removal of the inaccuracy as regards the determination of the differences from the law, for the stability and predictability of the basic law and last but not least for the reality and effectiveness of its supremacy. This study carries out an analysis of the techniques and requirements of selecting and adjusting the constitutional rules depending on the comparative criteria, referring to their specificity, to the practice of other states and within the historical background.