Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne
Graduate Student, Law
University of Bucharest, Facultatea de Drept
University of Bucharest, Facultatea de Filosofie
Thesis Title: “Law Overtaken by Politics: The Case of Communist Romania“
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Professor Pierre Legrand
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About
Because it is expected of me to write a sort of autobiographical note, I will mention that I have been originally intellectually socialized as a lawyer. This happened by means of a Licenta (that is, roughly, the Romanian ‘equivalent’ of an LLB) in Legal Sciences at the University of Bucharest (2005) and of a Maitrise (this time the French ‘equivalent’ of a BA) in European Law delivered by the Sorbonne still in 2005, in the framework of a double-degree programmed organized by the French College of European Studies in Bucharest.
In 2005 I was awarded the French Government Fellowship and I furthered the socialization process, albeit subverting it to some extent, by a Master’s degree in Comparative Legal Studies at the Sorbonne. Since then, I re-related to my interests in historiography, political philosophy and cultural theory (which I had kept for myself during the undergraduate studies). Owing to my ambivalent legal identity – having been trained in both Romanian and French schools, which made me not quite a Romanian lawyer, and, for sure, less of a French one – comparison seemed to suit me well and I finished the Master’s with 'mention Bien'.
In 2006, I started to work on my PhD. thesis, in an ambitious attempt to write a genealogy of legal thought and practice during Romanian communism, as I considered it a urgent task for legal theory to deal with the traumatic experience of dictatorship. As soon as September 2006, I have been granted by a ‘jury’ an allocation de recherche and I enthusiastically engaged in my research work and in a series of parallel projects. As such, my intellectual interests moved me from the picturesque (and sometimes even picaresque) venue of Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to the dull and dusty Romanian archives. As a counterbalance to the solitary work of research, I set off for teaching in Bucharest both at the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Philosophy, striving to find a common language between law and other disciplines in the framework of the Legal Theory seminars that I supervised. In 2008 I added to these commitments, that of teaching European law to students of the French College of European Studies.
Since then I have presented my perspectives on law and state violence in a series of conferences in different locations in Europe. I nonetheless continued my engagement with the theoretical underpinnings of legal comparison. Now I am in the final stages of organizing (that is re-reading, re-writing and revising) my thesis, which has considerably (and to some extent, unintentionally) grown over the last years.
