The Treaty of 9 December 1919 concerning minority protection was eventually signed by Romania only after fierce opposition grounded on the argument that the Treaty provisions contravene the principle of equal state sovereignty. The present paper is focused on examining the circumstances of the drafting of the 1919 Minority Treaty, on expounding its normative content and on depicting the situation of national minorities in interwar Romania. Finally, a general assessment of interwar Romania’s attitude towards minorities is undertaken.

The declarative establishment of democratic traditions or insurrectional ideals at a constitutional level is legitimate and explicable as an element of public law philosophy and social psychology, but also of national identification, especially in situations where the Constituent Assembly established a democratic political regime, opened to the aspirations of a nation that has liberated itself from the authoritarianism of a tyrannical government system. However, the issue we are raising is whether democratic traditions are justified in a normative regulation. In my opinion, the proper place to preserve the national values and the historical political and juridical traditions of a people cannot be the normative text of the Constitution, because it, as a fundamental normative act, from the point of view of positive law, has the role to regulate political, social and economic relations and others as valid social phenomena measurable politically and legally. The original place of the traditions and values of a community lies in its public consciousness and in the general lifestyle. Here, they retain intact the ideological content and form, as they penetrated through objective scientific knowledge, as well as through a spiritual path in the individual’s consciousness, and extended to successive generations. In this way, democratic traditions acquire an explanatory role for the philosophy of public law. A question arises: if democratic traditions are transposed by constitutional norms in the national legal order and converted into constitutional traditions, can they be challenged scientifically and historically? Contesting the democratic traditions in a scientific work or denying their existence, as well as legislating some areas of social life without considering the Romanian constitutional traditions, are subjected to malpractice or even sanctioned by the law?

In this study there are presented the main scientific arguments that can be taken into account for promoting a new discipline, as sub-branch of the Romanian criminal law, namely the criminal law of transports. For the scientific arguing of this approach, there have been briefly examined the system of Romanian law, the syntagms of branch, sub-branch and institution of our law. As regards the criminal law, reference has been made to the two parts, to some institutions and to the possibility of recognizing the criminal law of transports as sub-branch of the Romanian law. Likewise, within the scientific approach, it has been carried out a brief examination of the criminal law norms specific to the safety of traffic and of transports from Romania, insisting on the necessity of grouping them into a distinct normative act, recommending even a code of transports. The examination has considered the main elements of similarity between criminal law norms specific to the four domains of the national system of transports, namely: road, railway, naval and air.

This study addresses the problems determined by the fact that in the current Romanian criminal processual legislation there is a sign of equivalence between the moment of pronouncing the judgment and the moment of reading the minutes which contains only the operative part of the judgment. This aspect determines certain consequences that affect the rights of the persons who, in one quality or another, are involved in that criminal trial, resulting even in the execution of a minutes and in the conditional release before the reasoning of the appeal decision. For all these reasons, the study proposes that the reasoning of the judgment should be made before the pronouncement, which would remove all the above shortcomings and would strengthen the confidence of the litigants in the act of justice.

Part of our daily lives, light pollution enjoys less media coverage than other, more serious environmental issues, like climate change, air pollution, desertification of many areas of land, illegal deforestation of huge areas of forest land. We are talking about light pollution when artificial lights are everywhere – through billboards, street lighting, etc. – and such intensity that it changes the levels of natural lighting the night, with negative impacts on human health and biodiversity.

According to our traditional legal model, the French one, the author tries to outline the theoretical bases and the legal elements defining a Romanian littoral law. Starting from the problems of the development and protection of the Black Sea Romanian littoral, the existing national legislation, the requirements of its harmonization with the EU law and the international regulations in the field, fully expanding, the analysis addresses and formulates adequate answers related to the (legal) notion of littoral, the delimitations of the neighbouring and connected rights, the springs (internal, European Union and international), with particular attention in this respect to the Convention on the Protection of the Black Sea against Pollution, the general and specific principles related to the field, the specific concepts and terms, its character of protective law, of interference and with an integrated approach. Particular attention is paid to identifying the necessary connections, interdependencies and delimitations between the littoral law, the maritime law and the law of the sea. In the author’s view, the littoral law is a new field of reflection and a specific regulatory matter under development, with a normative proteiform tissue, but with two clear and precise objectives: rendering the economic and social development compatible with the increased exigences of protection and preservation, under the sign of sustainable development.