Normative Inflation – Cause of Inefficiency of Romanian Environmental Law

Legislative inflation, defined as an abnormal multiplication of legal norms, seems to be a natural and widespread phenomenon, but if certain limits are exceeded, the negative effects begin to appear. These occur primarily on litigants, but also on those who are charged with enforcing the rules. The normative excess encountered in Romanian environmental law generates first of all a diminution of confidence in its power to ensure the protection of fundamental rights, such as: the right to a healthy environment, the right to life and the right to health. Then the overproduction of norms gives rise to serious distortions in the application of the law or even comes to the impossibility of its application. In this context, this article launches an invitation to reflection on the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, and finally calls for a process of reforming the law making and enforcement activities of environmental law. Beyond presenting from a critical perspective the situation of the environmental legislation in Romania, the main objective pursued by this study is to propose possible solutions to remedy the situation found. A possible solution lies in the normative simplification that can be achieved through an efficient process of systematisation of laws, through the realisation of a coding in the matter and through incorporation. Keywords: Environmental legislation; Legislative inflation; Specialised courts; Codification in environmental law; Simplification of legislation