Part III

Seventy years ago, in March 1939, the first issue of what was then called the “Bucharest Law School’s Annals” was published as quarterly fascicles containing the results of scientific research conducted by professors and students, as well as reports on the highlights of legal and academic life at the time.

As the then-Dean, Professor G.G. Mironescu stated in his preface (reproduced as a facsimile in this issue), the aim of the publication was to foster and sustain “a scientific movement in the service of progress.”

The first issue included a number of substantial columns: one devoted to legal doctrine (authored by prominent professors such as Paul Negulescu, Constantin Rarincescu, Mircea Djuvara, Constant Georgescu, Ion Finţescu, and George Fotino); another devoted to “Works by students of the Faculty Institutes” (including the Institute of Administrative Law, where PhD student Iancu Toma had presented a paper on administrative litigation and the 1938 Constitution under Professor Rarincescu’s guidance, and the Institute of Legal Encyclopedia, where first-year student, Octavian Căpăţână—who would later become an eminent professor of law—had written a paper on jurisprudence as a source of law, under the guidance of Professor G. G. Mironescu); commentaries “on new books,” reports on new publications, and book reviews, as well as a review of the main Romanian and foreign legal periodicals.

That first issue also included a chronicle of events hosted by the various faculty institutes, a summary of the doctoral dissertations defended at the Law School, and information on the library’s book collection and latest acquisitions. The doctrinal studies and some reviews were in foreign languages. There was also coverage of both preliminary results of broader research and reasoned critiques of theories that were in vogue at the time. To ensure wider dissemination of ideas, the journal concluded with a summary of each contribution in English, French, German, and Italian.

Although only one issue per year was published for a long period after 1948, the journal resumed quarterly publication after 2000, with prominent figures from European legal circles serving on its Scientific Board.

Since most of the articles are published in foreign languages and summaries in those languages are also available, the annual journal of the Bucharest Law School has been part of publication exchange programs with nearly 200 overseas libraries and faculties.

In all honesty, “The Annals of the Bucharest Universities. Law Series” does not have a large readership among legal practitioners. However, we have pursued—and continue to pursue—the same goal as our predecessors: to open our journal to high-level scholarly debate and to disseminate in-depth analysis of the Romanian legal phenomenon not only in Romania but also abroad, to demonstrate—to paraphrase the chronicler—that “legal professionals are born in Romania too.”

Such an approach is not elitist, but—strange as it may seem—is rather pragmatic: in a world where, whether we like it or not, ideas are much like money (to put it as another representative of Romanian medieval culture would), i.e., what gives them value is their power of circulation, “The Annals of the University of Bucharest. Legal Series,” will maintain, even after celebrating its 70th anniversary, the same editorial policy, targeting both Romanian and international legal circles equally, with the conviction that it thereby serves the science of law, without which the general progress of society would not be possible.

AUBD Editorial Board