NOTICE: Romanian Journal of Comparative Law (Inaugural Issue)

The first issue of the Romanian Journal of Comparative Law has been published.

The announcement of the publication reads:

This journal is a new project of the main law faculties in Romania – Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași and Sibiu. It will have (for the moment) two issues / year and we intend to publish it in French and English languages.

A Romanian Journal of Comparative Law should not only be a true challenge to a Romanian legal academic community which is, somehow naturally, primarily focused on a parochial exegesis of the Romanian legal system but also a necessity in a contemporary context, where globalization brings inevitably together national legal systems and national legal cultures. Especially in the context of the European legal integration, whose part Romania became since 2007 as a full member of the European Union, the inevitable interaction with other European legal systems, with the European legal order itself, brings to our attention a stringent need to manage these legal-cultural encounters. The problems raised in this context are manifold: legal change in contemporary Romania develops not only through internal but also through strong external political impulses; the idea of improvement of the national legal system through a selective process of legal import is just partially applicable; the coherence of the national legal system develops more and more like an unattainable ideal; the legal practice is not undertaken in the context of the predictable and fairly understood national normative legal framework anymore. Basically, legal and cultural engineering are constantly at stake at the European Union level and the frequent reaction of rejection from Romanian legal professionals and society tells us that something must be done in order to grasp and correctly integrate this process.

In this entire context, comparative law studies seem to be not just a possible remedy for a particular social or legal problem but a compulsory epistemological attitude for the legal actors. Undertaken in the past by a bunch of legal scholars for more or less idealistic theoretical purposes, comparative law should become today an established pattern of legal knowledge. This is why comparative law can no more be an (un)methodological way to assemble information about foreign legal systems but a conscious and elaborated path to communicate with and understand the other in law. In this sense, this journal is not only aimed to provide rough data about the legal systems of the world but also to create a theoretical framework for an academic debate about how to meet and handle foreignness in law. It could be also an incentive to debate about the essential role that comparative law could play in the context of the European legal convergence and offer to the Romanian legal actors responses on why and how to meet other national legal systems in European Union.

Assuming these aims and in a very optimistic state of mind, we (a small group of young Romanian law scholars) hope to awake between the Romanian legal scholars the interest for the comparative approach in legal science. In the same time, we are conscious that the success of this project depends also on the scientific dialogue with our foreign colleagues.

For additional information, contact the journal's Editor-in-Chief, Manuel Gutan, at manuel.gutan@ulbsibiu.ro.