Mobility Phase: Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law & Romanian Academy – Legal Research Institute „Acad. Andrei Rădulescu” & Constitutional Court of Romania
Defending Constitutional Democracy in Romania: towards a judicial approach
Photo: Joanna Scheffel
Neliana Rodean is Adjunct Professor of Constitutional Law at University of Verona, Department of Law, Italy, receiving her PhD from the same university in 2014. She served as a Visiting Researcher at Columbia Law School, University Carlos III de Madrid, Max Planck Institute (Munich and Heidelberg) and was CooperInt Fellow at Miami School of Law. She lectured at Sciences Po - Institut d'études politiques de Paris, and was Erasmus Professor at LMU Munich, Universidade Católica Portuguesa do Porto, Universidad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, University Babes-Bolyai Cluj. Her research interests include constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, European Union Law, focusing on direct democracy, federalism and regionalism. She is the author of the monograph “Popular Initiative into European Labyrinth” (2014) and many research papers in national and international reviews. She is a member of the International Association of Constitutional law (IACL), the International Public Law Association (ICON-S), Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC) of American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL), Devolution Club, the Réseau académique sur la Charte sociale européenne (RACSE) - Section italienne. She is also honorary member from abroad at Romanian Association for Law & European Affairs (RALEA).
Defending Constitutional Democracy in Romania: towards a judicial approach
In recent years, European Union has faced a dilemma: in a framework promoting and defending constitutional democracy, various reforms implemented in Member States of the East had put under pressure the principle of rule of law and other fundamental European values. European political mechanisms have actually failed in protecting them, in particular, where its interference was seen as outside intrusion and boosted anti-EU sentiment. In states jeopardising democratic values and principles, notwithstanding the risk of boosting populism, a judicial mechanism would better respond to the protection of constitutional democracy for a twofold reason: the political method is not sufficient to ban reforms against European values, and the closure of constitutional democracy would facilitate populist forces even more than populism trend deriving from EU’s interferences. To answer this assumption, the research, considering the case of Romania, investigates, firstly, whether populism is a phenomenon that simply concerns policies or have a significant impact on constitutional democracy itself; secondly, describes the pros and cons of both mechanisms used to safeguard constitutional democracy, and demonstrates that a judicial approach facing infringement of the rule of law would prevent democratic backsliding there.
