REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Elena HELEREA: Homo Juris Professor Alexandru Herlea (1907-1979) 69
As a lawyer, he conducts a unrelenting campaign to defend the small landlords in
Apuseni Mountains, abusively dispossessed of their land by “Mica” company. The
“Mica”trial in which Alexandru Herlea was a barrister, pleading for them even in the
Court of Cassation an Justice, and who had a great impact revealing the corruption of
some judicial organisms and of some important politicians of the time. May I be allowed
to compare today those trials to the situation of Rosia Montana. Defending Rosia
Montana is an action that continues the defense of the great values of the Romanians for
which A. Herlea fought for all his life. The powerful commitment of his son, professor A.
Herlea junior, in defense of Rosia Montana does nothing else but prove his commitment
to his family tradition.
As a scientist, researcher and professor [3], Alexandru Herlea is a renowned specialist
in property and history of law in Transylvania. Among his works I mention:
- “The Gold Mines in the Apuseni Mountains and the State’s Authority over these
Mines” (1940),
- “Property Documents in Transylvania” (1943),
- “ A Misconception of Medieval Agricultural Property” (1944),
- “Real Estate Advertising” (1947),
- “Humanist Elements in the Romania of the Old“,
- “Jurisdiction in Transylvania and primitive samples“,
- “International relationships between the populations in the Romanian countries”,
- “Jurisdiction in Transylvania in the 16 th century”,
- “The historical circumstances of the approved Constitutions and their sociopolitical
effects on the Romanian population.”
The last ones would be published only after his death in a book called “Studies on the
History of Law” (1983) [4] with the effort of his wife, teacher Silvia Herlea.
“Aprobatae Constitutiones” is a fundamental work for the historiography of
Transylvania that Alexandru Herlea translated and analyzed, published only after 1998, a
year after the issue of the third volume of “Studies on the History of Law” [5]. All these
were published by Dacia Publishing House in Cluj under the supervision of Liviu Marcu
and Valeriu Sotropa. Some of his works were published abroad, such as ”Sur l'histoire de
la condition juridique de l’enfant en Roumanie”, published in Brussels, in «Recueils de la
société Jean Bodin» (1977).
Having a PhD certification in judicial sciences and economic and political sciences,
Alexandru Herlea was not isolated in an ivory tower, but on the contrary, he was a great
educator and extremely involved in research. Besides being a permanent professor at the
civil law department at the Commercial Academy in Brasov, he had organised a
prestigious seminar work until 1947, when he was fired at the first ”cleansing” of high
education institutions.
After his retirement (since the end of his second detention until his retirement, he
occupied a humble position of documentary searcher at the Institute of History of
“Nicolae Iorga” Academy) in 1974, he created “The Association of comparative history
of institutions and Law” that he affiliates at the “Association d'histoire du droit
international et des Institutions” in Paris and “Jean Bodin” company in Brussels and
founded the French magazine “Recherches sur l'histoire du droit et des Institutions”
that still continues nowadays. The association joined together a large number of
former political prisoners, including Corneliu Coposu that, in this context, could for
the first time speak in public after leaving prison, he was grateful for it to Herlea [6].