Tthe weaknesses of the Romanian Constitutional tradition or a constitutional present in quest for a constitutional past
The weaknesses of the Romanian Constitutional tradition or a constitutional present in quest for a constitutional past

Summary/Abstract: This paper has no particular ambition to critically analyse the ambit of the precommunist Romanian democratic constitutional tradition, it does not attempt to programmatically explain why it is so important to recapture the constitutional past after the fall of the communism and, even less, it has no intention to develop scientific paths meant to recover specific constitutional values, principles and institutions from the pre‐communist period. Instead, this paper has explanatory aims: it will try to explain the relevance of ‘the democratic traditions’ to the postcommunist Romanian constitutional culture. For this purpose, I shall use particular methodological perspectives and tools borrowed from the methodological panoply of comparative law. Thus, building on the particular disjunction between legal culture and legal tradition proposed by H. Patrick Glenn, I shall emphasize the paradoxical character of the Romanian contemporary constitutional tradition of being concomitantly ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ and, in the same time, I shall critically highlight the weakness of this kind of constitutional tradition.

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