General Considerations Regarding the Criminal Liability of the Lawyer in Romania

Abstract

The paper proposes an analysis regarding the possibility of the criminally convicted lawyers to keep pleading before the court without bearing the consequences of criminal liability, by speculating the lack of imperative law provisions in this sense. The legislative inflation affects not only the guarantees that the legality principles provide to the citizen, but it also reflects on the activity of specialists, theoreticians, or practitioners. They are overwhelmed by the abundance and obscurity of certain texts, reason for which it has become more and more difficult to interpret the law. The legislative deficiencies and the norms governing the profession of lawyer do not regulate clearly enough the fate of the criminally convicted lawyers; the lawyers within the board of the Bar must decide the fate of a fellow lawyer of the Bar.The law No. 51/1995 – regarding the organization and exercise of the lawyer's profession, as well as the statute of the lawyer – shows that the lawyer's capacity shall end if the lawyer has received a final sentence for an action incriminated by the criminal law, which renders him/her “unworthy of being a lawyer.” Concerning the method that constitutes the grounds of my research, I will use the comparison with other professions within the legal system; this will lead to comparatism, meaning to rapports between de jure and de facto situations. After analyzing the jurisprudence and the legislative framework corresponding to this phenomenon, I believe that punctual modifications should be brought to the texts of law; they must be circumscribed to an imperative force, thus leaving no room to interpretations.