The idea of this volume came from the fruitful debates of the Exploratory Workshop, on the same topic, organised at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu in October 2013, in which participated distinguished academics and practitioners from Romania and other European countries.

The balance between Europeanization and national judicial-cultural change, particularised to the Romanian case, is the central focus of this volume. Evaluated against some particular standards of Europeanization, especially as regards constitutional, human rights and methodological judicial standards, the contributions are trying to capture the challenges, difficulties and evolution of the Romanian judicial culture's Europeanization process. Mainly it is interesting to find out, on the one hand, whether the political-legal European engineering, aiming at formal political and normative uniformization, have been backed by the legal-cultural European engineering of judicial culture, and, on the other hand, how far the lack of judicial-cultural change is threatening the European legal and political integration. In this context, the contributors are not proposing a technical endeavour of comparing judicial cultures but rather a cultural immersion in the Romanian judicial culture. The final goals of the scientific analyses are primarily interpretative, sometimes explicative, but not curative. They aim at capturing a full picture of the contemporary Romanian judicial culture in European context, without necessarily finding out solutions to the existing Romanian European judicial-cultural deficit.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 

Introduction: Judicial Culture as Vector of Legal Europeanization - Manuel Gutan 

I. Paths of Change in (European) Judicial Culture 

Judicial Culture and European Integration – from an Austrian Perspective - Irmgard Griss 

Judicial Dialogue in the Process of Europeanization: the Perspective of Constitutional Justice - Rainer Arnold, Manuel Strunz

The Role of Dignity in Constitutional Comparative Justice - Cinzia Piciocchi 

Inertia or Pattern Following? Phase Lag of and Defiance by the Central and Eastern European Judiciary – Csaba Varga 

II. Constitutional Adjudication and Political Pressures 

Legitimization by Political Obedience or by Discourse? – Some Brief Considerations on the Jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of Romania - Marius Balan BALAN

Shaping the Role of the President: The Influence of the Romanian Constitutional Court’s Jurisprudence - Bogdan Dima 

III. Constitutional-Judicial Culture and Europeanization 

Constitutional Semantics and Legal Culture - Elena Simina Tanasescu  

Constitutional-Judicial Culture in Romania – Ambivalence and Possibility - Bogdan Iancu 

‘Europeanization’ Versus ‘New Localism’ in Shaping Fundamental Rights: ‘Free Speech’ Definitions, Limitations and Deadlocks in New Democracies - Alexandra Iancu 

IV. Judicial Culture and European Human Rights 

Direct Application of the European Court of Human Right’s Case-Law by Romanian Domestic Courts - Beatrice Ramascanu

Human Rights – An Element of the European Judicial Culture? - Bianca Selejan-Gutan 

The Romanian Judicial Culture and the Application of the European Court of Human Rights’ Case-Law. An Empirical Research - Manuel Gutan 

V. Judicial Culture and European Law 

The Culture of Excess (On How Not to Enforce the European Union Law) - Raluca Bercea 

Facing a Double Europeanization of the Refugee Law: The Romanian Courts’ Experiences – Catrinel Brumar