Principiul legalității la 10 ani de la intrarea în vigoare a Codului penal

The principle of legality is an old concept that stands as the bedrock of our legal system. It is a safeguard against despotism and is tightly bound to the rule of law, a notion that is prevalent in pluralist and democratic societies. The principle has not evolved considerably in the science of criminal law in the past decades, as shows the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. If looking through criminal law textbooks, one will arrive at the same conclusion, that the concept of legality is rather stable and well-established as a core concept of criminal law. However, the case-law of the Constitutional Court of Romania on this subject seems to have not been bound by the known limits of the principle of legality. In this paper I analyse six relevant decisions from the past decade in which the Court seems to have moved away from the traditional meaning of legality and adopted a looser approach to the term.