ABSTRACT
In this paper, I claim that the Romanian jurists were extremely successful towards the end of the 19th century in making the classical legal paradigm the dominant one in Romania, less than two decades after the enactment of the Romanian Civil Code of 1865 (copied from Code Napoleon). Unfortunately, after this initial success, it remained there at the conceptual level. If we look at Romanian jurisprudence through the prism provided by Duncan Kennedy in his analysis of the three globalisations of legal thought since the nineteenth century, we see that Romanian mainstream jurisprudence could not upgrade itself to a theory of social in the short 20th century, but it continued the debates of the classical period even during the real existing socialism. In the absence of a social theory, Romanian mainstream jurisprudence was exposed after 1990 to all the vagaries of neoliberal law, and besides weak justifications of unjustifiable political decisions, it is cantoned in a parlance far removed from the interests of the population at large.
Damsa, Liviu, What Kind of Theory for What Law? (March 8, 2024), Romanian Journal of Comparative Law, Forthcoming.
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