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The penal clause gives the advantage of leaving to the parties, and not to the law court, to fix the amount representing compensation for the damage incurred, this way the parties being informed, from the time of conclusion of contract, on what and how much the costs would be if they fail to fulfil the obligations assumed, being, from this point of view, a mechanism not only of defense against the consequences of a damaging non-performance, but also of constraint, both legal and moral, not allowing the parties to hope that, maybe, they will not pay or will pay much less for „breaking” the contract. This study examines the functions of the penal clause, namely the function of guarantee of performance of obligations, the function of mobilization of the debtor to perform its obligations, the sanctioning function and the compensatory function. At the same time, the study analyzes the consensual, incidental, sanctioning and reparative nature of the penal clause, as well as the legal nature of this type of clause. -
According to art. 32 of the Land Property Law no. 18/1991 (republished on January 5, 1998) in the case of „establishing” the right of ownership as provided in this law, the land thus attributed to individuals „shall not be alienated by documents between the living for 10 years, starting from the beginning of the year following the one during which the property was registered, under the penalty of absolute nullity of the alienation document”, the city hall, the prefect’s office, the prosecutor’s office or any other interested person being entitled to file a claim for the ascertainment of nullity. The author discusses the general cases resulting from this text of law, and in principal whether the 10-years term lapses (is counted) from the „registration” of the property in agricultural registries or from its „transcription”, or „registration” of an alienated property in transcription registries, namely its „registration” in the Land Book. -
Offences against police officers or gendarmes (in Romanian, ultraj) are regulated under Article 257 (4) of the Criminal Code, which provides that such offences shall be harsher punished, by increasing the special limits of the penalty by half. In order to apply the above-mentioned dispositions in a fair manner, the Panel for Clarification of Criminal Legal Aspects of the High Court of Cassation and Justice was requested to render a preliminary judgment by which to clarify if „the concept of police officer provided by Article 257 (4) of the Criminal Code shall be construed restrictively as referring only to police officers whose activity and status are regulated under Law No 218/2002 regarding the organisation and functioning of Romanian Police and under Law No 360/2002 regarding the Police Officer Status or more widely, as also including local police officers whose activity and status are regulated under Law No 155/2010 on Local Police and Law No 188/1999 on the Status of Civil Servants”. This article proposes an analysis of the relevant jurisprudence and provides arguments to support that the aggravated version of the crime regulated under Article 257 (4) of the Criminal Code shall be applied when the offence is committed against a local police officer. -
In this paper the author discusses whether a declaration of enforceability of the mortgage agreement is made by the court by way of absolving procedure (non-contentious) or, alternatively, via litigation. Based on fully reasoned arguments, it is concluded that, in this case, we face a contentious proceeding and not an absolving (non-contentious) one.
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In this study, the author, starting from the provision written down in Article 60 (1) c) of the Labour Code, according to which the dismissal of the pregnant employee is forbidden, as far as the employer was notified of this fact prior to the issuing of the dismissal decision, considers that the interpretation of this legal text should be performed extensively, in correlation with the provisions of Directive 92/85/EEC and, as such, the interdiction in question is also incidental, for example, in cases of dismissal of the employee in the trial period, of hiring the employee under a fixed-term contract or even if she did not notify the employer about her pregnancy condition prior to dismissal, if the failure to notify is not the consequence of bad faith of the person concerned and others. -
The modality of enforcement through garnishment involves the existence of a legal relationship, in which the pursued debtor has the quality of creditor, and the garnishee has the quality of debtor, a legal relationship used by the pursuing creditor in order to realize the claim from the writ of execution. The garnishment knows two phases, the one of establishment and the one of validation, the second one intervening only if the garnishee fails to fulfil its obligations as a result of communicating the address for establishment of garnishment. The application for validation of the garnishment is a veritable application for summons, its finality being to obtain a writ of execution by the executing creditor against the garnishee. The study examines the defences which the garnishee can invoke in the court of validation, having regard to the legislative solution provided by the current Civil Procedure Code, according to which a garnishee is forbidden to file a contestation to the enforcement against the acts establishing the garnishment, the latter being able to use his defences only before the court of validation [Article 787 (5) of the Civil Procedure Code]. Therefore, the processual means of invoking the defences before the court of validation are analyzed, being questioned the admissibility of the garnishee’s filing of a counter claim aiming at the cancellation of the juridical act from which the relationship between him and the debtor arose. The defences of the garnishee are analyzed starting with the distinction between defences on the merits and the processual and procedural ones, in relation to the possibility conferred to the third party to invoke against the creditor all the pleas and defences that he may oppose to the debtor, to the extent that they are prior to the establishment of garnishment [Article 790 (3) of the Civil Procedure Code].
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In the absence of technical basis, the two criticized normative acts, through the refusal of the legislature to consider the reactions of all actors involved and relevant institutions, the legislature has transformed the principles of law and rules of law into abstract and worthless rules that can be violated at any time. The intervention of the Constitutional Court through its two decisions (Decision No 623/2016 and Decision No 62/2017) restored legal order, which was seriously violated by these acts. -
Mediation is governed by Law No 192/2006. In criminal matters, mediation is a restorative practice designed to solve the conflict between the parties involved. For a limited number of offences a criminal mediation agreement has the effect of preventing the initiation of criminal prosecution or ending criminal proceedings. This does not mean that parties may come to an agreement on the criminal aspects of the criminal proceedings as the legislator may seem to let us to believe. The only aspect on which an agreement may be reached concerns withdrawal of a prior complaint or reconciliation of parties in case of certain offences; these are impediments distinctively regulated in the mediation agreement. As a matter of fact, the consensus between parties in criminal proceedings, contained in the mediation agreement, exceeds the limits imposed by what is usually considered as the criminal aspect and the civil aspect of those proceedings. Through their will, parties may limit themselves to an agreement only on civil claims within criminal proceedings. -
The study deals with the directions of the very probable, and at the same time, the possible review of the Constitutional Court. The starting point in this analysis is to identify the Romanian specific in the control of constitutionality of the period before and after the Revolution of December 1989, compared to models offered by other member countries of the European Union. The review of criticisms that have been made ”to the Constitutional Court and the solution chosen by the Constituent Assembly of 1991 will lead in the final part of the study to the drafting of the possible solutions to be considered by the future constitutional review to make the constitutional justice in Romania more legitimate and more effective. -
This paper approaches the theme of disuse as a modality of lapse of the subdivisions of the property right. If the property right, given its perpetuity, does not lapse by disuse, its subdivisions, which are mostly temporary, shall lapse by the failure to exercise the right. The sanction is expressly regulated by the present Civil Code in matters of usufruct and servitude and it is applicable, for identity of reason, to use and habitation. The study also examines the extent of interference of the disuse with the acquiring of the subdivided right by usucaption, as well as the consequences that it might have the legal nature of the limitation period acknowledged to the disuse period. -
The institution of course of justice interruption was first introduced in the criminal procedure of Romania in the Charles II Code of Criminal Procedure (1936), being kept in the current Code of Criminal Procedure [Art. 29 point 5 item b)] and also in the new Code of Criminal Procedure adopted by Law No. 135/2010 [Art. 40 paragraph (4)]. The author shows that the Romanian legislator failed to clarify this phrase, leaving the identification of the cases of interrupting the course of justice to the legal literature, but especially to the case law. The case law of the High Court of Cassation and Justice may conclude that the “interrupting the course of justice” phrase requires the occurrence of a criminal case pending before a court of law which has no possibility of achieving the ultimate goal of the trial due to inapplicability of any of the procedural provisions relating to jurisdiction, so that the competent court to order a legal solution cannot be determined. -
The cases that justify a home search are still the subject of important controversies both in doctrine and especially in practice. Also, the delimitation between the situation in which the criminal investigation agents enter a person’s home in order to carry out a home search and the situations in which the police agents are obliged to enter a home to fulfil their duties is of ten extremely sensitive. It is precisely these controversies that often lead state agents to be reluctant to enter a private space in order to avoid being accused of committing a crime. We hope that this study will prove to be a useful tool in identifying those hypotheses in which it is really necessary to resort to a home search as well as the criteria for delimiting the search and other institutions of criminal procedural law.
