On number of occasions, the Constitutional Court is in the position to determine whether a norm is constitutional or not, referring to the provisions of Article 1 (5) of the Constitution, republished version. In order to comply with the provisions of this article, it is necessary for the law, the obedience of which is required by the very first article of the Basic Law, to be clear, precise and predictable. There are numerous decisions of the Constitutional Court which state that the law is devoid of „quality”, i.e. the law is not clear, precise and predictable. The non-compliance of these requirements results in a violation of the provisions of Article 6 (1) of the Law No 24/2000 on normative technical norms for the drafting of normative acts, republished, subsequently amended and supplemented, according to which the draft of the normative act must establish necessary, sufficient and possible rules leading to the greatest legal stability and efficiency. Thus, whenever the legislator uses notions whose legal nature is uncertain or do not integrate from the conceptual point of view into the normative system, or when the legislator resorts to the use of innovative concepts in the normative acts and does not define them in their very content, the Constitutional Court will have all the reasons to establish that the provisions of Article 1 (5) of the Constitution are violated, the text being inadequately drafted.

The jurists naturally privilege the continuity, stability, coherence. If the political tends to periodically break the coherence of the social structures, the jurists conceive themselves as „doctors” thereof, and „their technique is precisely the extirpation of the void, the anticipation of the crises, the assurance of the continuity, or even the mending, after the stroke, of the ruptures of the institutional weave”1. The legal privileging of the continuity of the social evolution is translated by the structuring of the system on the basis of some principles aimed at attenuating the tendencies of radicalization of the social claims in the name of the prevalence of a certain conception about the good society over its alternatives. It is fundamental for the jurists that the law ensures the priority of the protection of freedom through the mechanisms of the rule of law over the general interest resulted from the democratic exercise of power. The law based on this vision can not be the result of a general transcendent interest over the interests of the members of the society, but must be the result of the accessibility and availability thereof.

The dilemma on the bicameralism or unicameralism of the EC/EU legislator has existed for a long time. Not a few times, given the name of Parliament, operating with relative similarities regarding the states as subjects of international law, it was considered that it was and remained the legislature of the EC/EU. Over time, primary law and practice were likely to clarify things. Thus, at the beginnings of the Community construction, the Council acted as genuine supreme legislator, which had been gradually joined, as an institution of political control, consultation, cooperation and co-decision, by the European Parliament, so that currently the two institutions are equally involved in the legislative process of a two-chamber system.

The civil liability of judges and prosecutors for damages caused by torts related to their professional duties is a subject of actuality much debated by legal professionals, the media and the civil society as a whole. Problems such as judicial errors, arrest followed by exculpatory decisions, controls and other forms of discriminatory police abuse performed sometimes at the request of prosecutors are just some of the examples observed by many contemporary societies as dangers for the human rights and liberties. The constitutions, laws and case law provide for answers to the questions in connection with the tort liability of judges and prosecutors. Latest, it becomes visible worldwide a certain way of thinking which advocates for more restrictive rules regarding the subject. This phenomenon is noticeable not only in Romania but also in other countries, such as the United States and France. The paper proposes a synthesis of the constitutional, legal framework and case law in the United States of America, with a special focus on the Supreme Court of Justice cases regarding the civil liability of judges and prosecutors. Since the notions of absolute immunity and qualified immunity in this context are quite unknown to the Romanian legal readers, this paper should add some value to their knowledge of the way of thinking the relation between independence versus accountability of the judiciary specific to the legal traditions of the U.S. From the perspective of the U.S. case law, the paper presents some of the most relevant cases of the Supreme Court of Justice such as: Stump v. Sparkman, Griffith v. Slinkard, Yaselli v. Goff, Imbler v. Pachtman, Burns v. Reed and Buckley v. Fitzsimmons. Although quite old some of them, the majority of the conclusions resulted from this case law are still valid today, with nuances, mainly in the area of the qualified immunity for prosecutors.

The meanings of the principle of proportionality are identified in the case law and in the legal doctrine during the modern and contemporary period, emphasizing the idea of continuity in understanding this principle. The main connotations of this principle, found in the doctrine, are expressed by the ideas of fairness, balance, adequate ratio, reasonableness, equity, but also in logical plan, by the dialectic reasoning of proportionality. The analysis of case law and of doctrine reveals the importance of this principle, whose purpose is to materialize the legal standard, to substantiate the concept of legitimacy in law and to serve as a key criterion that allows the demarcation between the legitimate manifestations of the state power and, on the other hand, the excess of power in the activity of the state authorities. The only regulations of the Romanian Constitution which specifically refer to the principle of proportionality are included in Article 53, with the marginal title „Restriction of the exercise of some rights and freedoms”. In this study, by using different ways of legal interpretation, we also identify other constitutional rules which involve this principle.

In the same way as the institutional decision-making system of the European Union (the European Commission, the Council, the European Parliament) participating in the unional legislative mechanism (the procedures of adoption of the derived legislation of the European Union) has undergone, in an evolutive sense, permanent changes of reformatory nature, in favour of some elements specific to bicameralism (the Council – the European Parliament; the European Parliament – the Council), within the institutions that make up the jurisdictional system of the European Union we are also witnessing the same permanence of the concerns for institutional reform placed in the structural-organizational plan, but also in the one of the competences ratione materiae, ratione personae. All these occurred and still occur in close relation to the process of enlargement of the European Union, as well as to the multiplication of the areas which fall under the exclusive competences of the European Union and of those shared between the European Union and the Member States, correlated with the principles of subsidiarity, proportionality, conferral and loyal cooperation.