In this article, the author advocates the necessity to adopt a special law on the liability of magistrates for committing the judicial errors through bad faith or due to their own negligence. The beginning of reforming the political system set in motion in December 1989 has generated also the change of the judicial system as a whole and, at the same time with it, of the relations between the state and the citizen, according to the principles of the constitutional democracy. As the new government system places at its foundation the individual-citizen, it was natural for the state to assume a direct liability for the violation by its judicial agents of the legitimate rights and interests of the citizens. In this framework, it was built a system of corrections for judicial errors, extended to the effective legal liability of the judges and of the public prosecutors who, in bad faith or gross negligence, have violated the processual rights of the parties in the trial, have convicted them unjustly, or have subjected them without any grounds to some repressive procedures. This system of moral and material corrections does not work, the provisions in the matter, included in the processual legislation, are not sufficient for the citizen to gain full confidence in the act of justice. A special law is necessary not only to ensure the corrections of the judicial errors, but also to exemplarily sanction the guilty parties for violating the law.

Dacă, în ceea ce privește societățile pe acțiuni, legiuitorul a menționat expres în art. 118 alin. (1) din Legea nr. 31/1990 privind societățile posibilitatea ca în convocatorul pentru prima adunare generală să se fixeze ziua și ora pentru cea de-a doua adunare generală, când cea dintâi nu se ține, o asemenea posibilitate nu este prevăzută și pentru societățile cu răspundere limitată. O astfel de mențiune nu echivalează cu o convocare legală pentru cea de-a doua adunare generală, cerința celei de-a doua convocări rezultând din mențiunea expresă din cuprinsul art. 193 alin. (3) din Legea nr. 31/1990.

The study shows that Article 291 of the Criminal Procedure Code, with the marginal name „Referrals made by persons in management positions and by other persons”, provides a sui generis way of referral to the criminal prosecution bodies, separately from the complaint, denunciation and ex officio referral. It is appreciated that the text establishes an obligation to refer the matter to the criminal prosecution body, particularised by subject and object. The subject of this obligation is, among others, any person who exercises a service of public interest for which he has been entrusted by the public authorities. This description corresponds to the notion of civil servant, within the meaning of Article 175 (2) of the Criminal Code. The judge pertains to this category, by the fact that he exercises a service of public interest and by the fact that he has been entrusted by the public authorities to exercise it. Consequently, it is shown that subject of the obligation to refer the matter to the criminal prosecution body is an offence about the commission of which the judge has become aware in the exercise of his duties. The article also notes that Article 346 (7) of the Criminal Procedure Code is mandatory for the preliminary chamber judge, but the extent of this obligation is limited by the need to comply with Article 354 (2) of the Criminal Procedure Code. Thus: as a rule, the preliminary chamber judge who ordered the commencement of the trial has the obligation to join the composition of the judicial panel that exercises the judicial function; by way of exception, if the preliminary chamber judge that has ordered the commencement of the trial is prevented by an objective cause from joining the composition of the judicial panel, he may be replaced with another judge. The sanction of the violation of Article 346 (7) of the Criminal Procedure Code is the absolute nullity arising from the non-observance of the rules regarding the composition of the judicial panel. It is appreciated that absolute nullity is incidental, since Article 346 (7) of the Criminal Procedure Code is violated, in two hypotheses: the preliminary chamber judge who has ordered the commencement of the trial is not also the judge who exercises the judicial function, and this is not caused by any impediment; the preliminary chamber judge who ordered the commencement of the trial is not also the judge who exercises the judicial function, and this is caused by a non-objective impediment.

Both in the Member States and at European and international level there are currently concerns for finding the best means of combating tax fraud and tax evasion. Recent measures place the good tax governance among the means of fighting against this phenomenon, and it is estimated that joint actions at European level are more effective, being meant to encourage also third countries to apply minimum standards of good tax governance. At the same time, the concept of good tax governance, as well as those of tax fraud and tax evasion are taken under consideration by the doctrinaires in the field of criminal and tax law, but the definitions given to them have been imprecise and sometimes contradictory. In this context, we intend to emphasize the contribution of good tax governance as an effective means to prevent and mitigate tax fraud and tax evasion both at national, European and international level.

This study has as object the incidental regulations in the matter of illegal border crossings and of asylum, as well as how they intersect, and it intends to find an adequate solution for what happens with the criminal prosecution, in the cases of fraudulent crossings of the state border, in the course of solving the application for being granted a form of protection submitted by the person who has illegally crossed the border. It is proposed the intervention of the legislator in the sense of introducing a rule which provides as cause of suspension of the criminal prosecution the situation where the person wanted for the fraudulent crossing of the state border has subsequently submitted an application for being granted a form of protection and is subject to the asylum procedure. The need for such intervention is motivated by the ineffectiveness of continuing the criminal prosecution and of the settlement of the case provided that, at the end of the asylum procedure, the person concerned can be granted a form of protection from among those recognized by the Law No 122/2006, the cause of non-punishment provided in Article 11 of this law being thus incidental.

This study analyzes the particularities involved by the powers of the Court of Accounts to establish contraventions and to apply offences punishable in the specific activity of control/audit they achieve. Two categories of offences can be identified, namely contraventions that the Court of Accounts only finds, not having the power to apply sanctions against them, and contraventions for which the Court of Accounts is competent not only to identify them but also to apply the sanctions for them. The rules on contraventions that may be applicable to deviations discovered by the Court of Accounts can be found in the Law on the organization and functioning of the Court of Accounts No 94/1992, as well as in other special regulations that are analyzed in this article. The approach is carried out not only from a legislative and doctrinal perspective, but also from a case law perspective, being exemplified in some solutions given by the courts in cases concerning complaints against the contravention reports drawn up by the Court of Accounts. Finally, some conclusions are presented, which also include the authors’ point of view on the perspective approach, including by the legislator, of this issue.

The concept of material error is evoked in two texts of the Civil Procedure Code, respectively in Article 442 and in Article 503 (2) point 2. For the purposes of Article 442 of the Civil Procedure Code, according to the opinion unanimously accepted by the doctrine and by the case law, material error is the mistake slipped in the contents of the judgment, at the time of drafting, which does not affect the foundation or the legality of the solution pronounced by the court. The correction of such material errors is made according to a special procedure regulated by law, which has as its finality the correction of such errors slipped, at the time of drafting, within the minutes, the preambles, the recitals, or even within the operative part of a judgment, which may be a sentence, a decision or a minutes of the session. This category of material errors includes those related to: the name, quality and oral submissions of the parties, those of calculation, etc. The legal meaning of the concept of material error, within the meaning of Article 503 (2) point 2 of the Civil Procedure Code, is sensitively different from that attributed to this concept by Article 442 of the Civil Procedure Code. From this perspective, the material error is any essential and involuntary omission in relation to the situation existing in the file at the time when the court of recourse delivers the judgment. In other terms, the obvious material error concerns formal aspects of the recourse which had as consequence the wrongful settlement of this legal remedy. It is about that mistake made by the court by confusing some important elements or some material data and which determines the solution delivered. The doctrine defines the judicial error as the error of judgment committed by judges or by prosecutors in the course of conducting a judicial procedure. This error may be of law or of fact and in any system of law such an error stands as basis for exercising of the ordinary or extraordinary legal remedies.

Celebrating the Day of Justice is a good opportunity for the theoreticians and the practitioners of law to subject to reflection topics of a particular interest, legislative and jurisprudential solutions, or de lege ferenda aspects. Such an event also enables the evaluation of the institutional relations between the authorities that have a well-defined constitutional role in exercising the judicial authority, as well as of the contribution of the different legal professions to the general and complex law enforcement process. From this perspective, the author emphasizes not only the importance of the celebration reunion of the representatives of the main institutions and professional organizations of jurists, but also the requirement for such an event to be marked by scientific manifestations, in which the participants to make known their own researches in the field, to debate in a spirit of fellowship and solidarity issues facing justice as a public service, the statute of magistrates, as well as of the other legal professions. In a way, every man of law is responsible for the triumph of the idea of justice in his profession.

This paper presents a point of view regarding the correlated interpretation of both articles 53 from the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereinafter, ECHR) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (hereinafter, the Charter) in the context of EU accession to ECHR. Opinion 2/13 of the EU Court of Justice from 18 December 2014 establishes that there is no provision in the Commission’s project agreement for EU accession to ECHR that envisages to ensure a coordination between both articles 53, allowing Member States to provide for higher standards on human rights protection than ECHR or the Charter, which could entail the undermining of the primacy, unity and effectiveness of EU law.

The attributions that confer substance to the activity of the prosecutor before the jurisdictional body are the participation in the trial of the criminal and civil cases, the exercise of the means of appeal against the judgments, the examination of the cases of non-uniform application of the law and the analysis of the cases in which the courts have delivered final judgments of acquittal, return or referral to the prosecutor. In criminal matters, the prosecutor mandatorily participates in the trial, under the sanction of absolute nullity, in the cases where the law expressly provides for his participation, and optionally, in cases other than those in which the law establishes the obligativity of participation. In civil matters, the rule is that the prosecutor takes part in the trial optionally, when he considers it necessary to defend the rule of law, the rights and interests of citizens. By way of exception, the prosecutor mandatorily participates in the trial of the civil cases when the obligativity is expressly provided. In criminal matters, the law opens for the prosecutor the path to exercise all means of appeal, ordinary (appeal, contestation) or extraordinary (recourse in cassation, contestation for annulment, revision), against various judgments. In civil matters, the prosecutor may exercise the means of appeal when he deems it is necessary to protect the rights and legitimate interests of minors, of the persons placed under interdiction and of the missing persons, or when he has participated in the trial of the case.

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 legal epistemology justifies the interest of this study for the relations which are established between the notions of branch of law, of sub-branch of law, of legal institution, as well as their relations with the forms of legal liability which they regulate. In the problems of the dynamics of the relations between the branches of law and the forms of legal liability the rule is that every branch of the law knows or generates at least one form of legal liability. Starting with the theoretical challenge launched by Professor Antonie Iorgovan, regarding the elements that announce the appearance of a new form of legal liability within or outside a branch of law, the novelty proposed by this study consists in the approach of the inverse relation, precisely of the capacity of a new form of legal liability to generate a new branch of law, as well as its reception by a legal science of branch. The verification of the validity of the capacity of mutual cogeneration between the forms of legal liability and the branches of law will be achieved by means of the examples of the relations established between the ecological liability and the environmental law, the objective liability and the insurance law, the managerial liability and a possible managerial law on the ground of legal methodology.

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.

Conform prevederilor art. 396 alin. (6) C.pr.pen., instanța pronunță încetarea procesului penal atunci când există vreunul dintre cazurile prevăzute la art. 16 alin. (1) lit. e)–j) C.pr.pen. Unul dintre aceste cazuri, prevăzut de art. 16 alin. (1) lit. g) teza ultimă C.pr.pen., se referă la situația în care „a fost încheiat un acord de mediere în condițiile legii”. (Curtea de Apel Galați, Decizia penală nr. 1278/A/8.12.2016 dată în Dosarul nr. 1324/233/2016, cu notă aprobativă)

The notion of „principle” has known three approaches throughout its history: ontological (philosophical), logical, and normative. Ontologically, it would mean the primary object of knowledge stemming from the intellectual act, by the procedure of induction, generalization (a form of reasoning), starting from the particular and ending with the general, from facts to concepts. In a logical sense, it is a general proposal induced from particular rules, being a source for deductive reasoning wherein the conclusion follows necessarily premises that are sources of orientation: ideas, facts, situations. Legal logic has a wide content, and it is considered that logical principles denote, on the one hand, a body of rules stemming from a methodic and reflected development, rules ordered systematically, and, on the other hand, the axioms that substantiate a rational structure. This is how principles are linked with the perpetual work of sensibly organizing the law (the activity of legislation). In a normative sense, the principle no longer describes the object or a form of logic, nor does it describe an axiom or a reason-based system of rules, but a legal norm/standard whereby an obligation is asserted, establishing a resource for the legal interpreter. Interpretative adages which relate, however, to formal rules of logical reasoning, may clash and lack any compelling force, being used by the judge in the development of his/her own policy. The role of the principles is to ensure the coherence and harmony of the legal system, since they are the expression of superior values embedded in the spirit of the law. Regarding the content and the extent of the principle of legal certainly, legal literature has identified three levels of approach: pre-judicial legal certainty; procedural legal certainty and post-judicial substantial legal certainty; all of them meet to ensure the „predictability of the law” so that the parties/the litigants have a feeling of certainty.

The independency or autonomy of public servants in construing and applying the law is warranted by the Constitution or by law. By virtue of the independency or autonomy, public servants construe and apply the law according to the own beliefs, being entitled to reject any interference from authorities or persons. Errors of public servants in the process of construing and applying the law can result in their non-criminal legal liability, if the conditions of such legal liability are fulfilled, as the case may be, civil tort or contract, disciplinary, material, taxation or contravention liability, in no case criminal liability for the offence of abuse of office provided by Article 297 (1) of the Criminal law.

In this study, the author makes an analysis on the right to life, with emphasis on the moment when the right to life begins to flow, including from the phase of conception of human life, by reference to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and of other courts outside the European Union, following that, in the final part of the study, an analysis be made on the current criminal provisions protecting the right to life in its incipient phase and the compliance of these provisions with the standard required by the Convention.

The recent case law of the Romanian Constitutional Court gives shape to a new doctrine regarding the Court’s role in ensuring the national legislator’s compliance with the European Union’s competences. In order to identify the new doctrine’s background, the current article analyzes the evolution of the Romanian constitutional case law on the application of Union law. Subsequently, the current position of the Constitutional Court is extensively described, emphasizing both its immediate consequences and possible future developments.