The Unlikely Continuity. The Communist Legacy of Romanian Consumer and Residential Credit Laws

Abstract The study challenges the dominant narrative that Romanian consumer and residential credit laws are a product of the country’s return to capitalism and the market economy, proposing an alternative interpretation. It demonstrates that the origins of Romanian consumer and residential credit laws lay in the pre-World War II and communist legislation that survived the 1989 Revolution. This shows that the communist legacy in consumer and residential credit is real and more enduring than expected and that communism did not differ from capitalism in this respect, other than how consumer and residential credit was organised. Using legal history and doctrinal analysis in a functional approach coupled with statistical and empirical data, the study proves the existence of a normative continuity between pre-and post-1989 Romanian consumer and residential credit laws that ended with the EU accession efforts. Finally, this continuity between communist and capitalist consumer and residential credit laws indicates functional similarities between the monarchic (capitalist) and communist legal systems, further undermining the relevance of political and economic ideology and the idea that communism was inimical to consumers and consumer or residential credit.