Researching the Law of Romania

At a glance

Legal system family

Civil law. Article 73 of the Constitution reserves to organic law the general legal regime of property and inheritance, along with the organisation of the courts, the public ministry and the Court of Accounts.²

Official gazette

Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei, produced by the Regia Autonoma Monitorul Oficial under Legea nr. 202/1998 and Hotararea nr. 844/2018, with publication, republication and rectification governed by Ordin nr. 367/2022.¹

Constitution in force

Constitutia Romaniei. The Constitutional Court serves the full text through article 156, which provides for the Constitution to be republished with a new numbering after a revision is approved by referendum.²

Language of the authoritative text

Romanian. Article 13 of the Constitution states that in Romania the official language is Romanian.²

The first thing to know about Romanian legal publishing is who does it. The Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei is produced by the Regia Autonoma Monitorul Oficial, a state enterprise, and that enterprise publishes on its own site the short list of instruments that constitute it and govern its work: Legea nr. 202/1998 on the organisation of the Monitorul Oficial, the amending Legea nr. 208/2018, Hotararea nr. 844/2018 on the organisation and operation of the Regia itself, and Ordin nr. 367/2022 on the procedures for publication, republication and rectification and for publication in special issues. Four names, all findable, and the fourth is the one that governs the mechanic most likely to catch a foreign reader out.

The rule that decides when a Romanian statute bites is constitutional rather than administrative. Article 78 provides that a law is published in the Monitorul Oficial and enters into force three days after publication, or on a later date the text itself sets. Three days, not one, and not on the day of publication. A researcher working out whether a rule applied to conduct on a particular date has to hold the publication date and the commencement date apart, and the gap is wide enough to matter in a limitation dispute. The equivalent interval is different in France and different again in Madagascar, and each of those pages sets out its own.

Article 73 sorts Romanian statutes into three kinds. Parliament passes constitutional laws, organic laws and ordinary laws, and the constitutional laws are the ones that revise the Constitution. The distinction is not decorative: an organic law is reserved to a list of subjects that article 73 then sets out, beginning with the electoral system and running through states of siege and emergency, offences and penalties, and the status of civil servants, before reaching two items that matter to anyone placing Romania in a tradition. Letter l reserves the organisation of the Superior Council of Magistracy, the courts, the public ministry and the Court of Accounts. Letter m reserves the general legal regime of property and inheritance. Private law here is something the legislature is required to lay down, and a citation that gives a number and a year without saying which kind of law it was has dropped the fact that determines how it could be amended.

Now the trap. Article 156 provides that after a revision has been approved by referendum the Constitution is republished by the Consiliul Legislativ, with the names of institutions brought up to date and, critically, with the text given a new numbering. Romanian constitutional articles have therefore moved. An article number in a judgment, a textbook or a foreign article is a number in whichever numbering was current when it was written, and there is no way to tell from the number alone. Anyone citing a Romanian constitutional article across a revision boundary has to check the article against the republished text rather than assume the number travelled with the provision.

That check is harder than it should be, and the difficulty is worth stating plainly because it changes what a reader should trust. Every Romanian host that serves the constitutional text refused an automated request on the date this page was prepared. www.ccr.ro, the Constitutional Court, returned HTTP 503 behind a page reading that it was verifying the browser, to a request carrying a full set of browser headers as readily as to a bare one, and the identical body came back from the Presidency, the General Secretariat of the Government and the Foreign Ministry, so it is one interstitial in front of several hosts rather than a quirk of the court. www.cdep.ro, the Chamber of Deputies, did not complete a connection at all. legislatie.just.ro, which is where the Ministry of Justice sends readers for the codes, aborted the TLS handshake on every attempt from two different clients.

So the constitutional text cited above is an Internet Archive capture of the court's own page, taken on 13 August 2025, and this page says so rather than implying the live document was read. The capture is worth one further observation. It carries the whole text through article 156 and it carries no date of its own: the strings 1991 and 2003 do not appear anywhere in it. A reader who wants to know which revision the text is current to cannot learn it from the page that serves it, which is a strange gap on exactly the document where the numbering question makes currency load bearing.

The Government keeps a short page of its own naming where legislation lives, and it names three destinations and no others: the Monitorul Oficial, the Chamber of Deputies legislative database, and the Ministry of Justice courts portal. Two of the three are among the hosts described above. The third, portal.just.ro, answers normally.

The Ministry of Justice is the better starting point for the substance, with one caution about how to read its site. Its legislation page carries the instruments the Ministry itself works under, Legea nr. 304/2022 on judicial organisation, Legea nr. 303/2022 on the status of judges and prosecutors, and the 2024 government decision on the Ministry's own organisation. A standing menu across the top of every page on the same site names the codes, Codul civil, Codul de procedura civila, Codul penal, Cod de procedura penala and an annotated Codul insolventei. Read quickly, that menu looks like a publisher's catalogue. It is not. Four of its five entries are links out to legislatie.just.ro, the host that will not open, so the menu tells a researcher what the codes are called and nothing at all about who serves them.

That leaves Romanian legal research in an odd position for a member state of the European Union. The gazette is open, well documented and names the four instruments that govern it. The constitutional text and the consolidated codes are behind hosts that answer a browser and refuse everything else. A researcher with a browser has no problem here. A researcher building anything, a citation checker, a link monitor, a corpus, will find that the two halves of Romanian primary law behave nothing alike, and should design for the gazette rather than for the codes.

Primary sources online

• Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei (opens an external site)The publication of record. The institution names the acts that govern publication, republication and rectification.
• Curtea Constitutionala a Romaniei (opens an external site)Serves the constitutional text and the court's decisions. Normal in a browser; it answers 503 to automated clients.
• Ministerul Justitiei, Legislatie (opens an external site)The Ministry's own list of the codes and the judicial organisation statutes, with links out to the consolidated texts.
• Portalul instantelor de judecata (opens an external site)The courts portal, and the one of the Government's three named destinations that answers an ordinary request.
• Guvernul Romaniei, Legislatie (opens an external site)Three destinations for Romanian legislation and no more, named by the Government itself.

Reviewed 2026-08-30. 5 sources cited on this page.