Eroarea de drept penal: în sfârşit o îmblânzire a absurdului!
Mistake of Criminal Law: finally, taming the absurd!

Summary/Abstract: Ignoring the principle nemo censetur legem has become common. But what is its real meaning? Which of the two meanings that doctrine assigns is real: no person can defend claiming ignorance or mistake of law or is the law binding to everybody, even to those who have ignored it? We consider the latter as correct. In time, the mechanism created by this principle has suffered mitigations. Mistake of law is the legal tool through which it became more flexible in the criminal law systems of various states and, as we shall show, including Romania, quite recently. An analysis from the perspective of comparative law is relevant. Italy and France highlights two means of proscribing mistake of criminal law: praetorian (ie, through the intervention of the Constitutional Court), and legislative. In modern Romanian criminal law, mistake of criminal law was not established until recently legal, but was admitted by doctrine in exceptional situations. The new Criminal Code expressly provides for criminal law mistake, in article 30 para. (5), stating that “if upon commission of the act the perpetrator lacks the appreciation that he is doing something, he acts without guilt if he was unable to avoid this mistake”. The issues raised by the doctrine about this type of mistake, under the old Criminal Code, retain actual: the terminology, the conditions of mistake of law, its effects and so on. However, new issues appear due to the new legislation. The present study aims to explain these difficulties. In addition, legislative sources of inspiration are shown. As a conclusion, the new effects of mistake of law are considered to be beneficial for the recipients of the Criminal law, according to the spirit of humanism.

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