Hand the same contract to a Bucharest judge and a London judge and they will not read it the same way. Not because one is stricter than the other, but because they are looking for different things.
Civil law begins with the Code: a written, systematic statement of the rules, which the judge applies to the facts. Common law begins with the decided case: the law is what courts have worked out, dispute by dispute, and the judge adds to it. Two different instincts about where law lives — and they shape every contract that crosses between them.
The same clause, two readings
Take a single idea — good faith — and watch it change weight as it crosses the seam. A clause that leans on the parties’ good-faith cooperation is load-bearing in Romania and comparatively thin in England.
Civil law reads
A general duty to perform honestly and loyally runs through the whole contract. The court can use it to fill silences, and in places even to temper a term that operates harshly. Good faith does real work.
Common law reads
There is no general duty of good faith. The parties are largely held to the words they chose. Cooperation must usually be written in as a specific obligation, or it cannot be relied on.
Why it matters at the seam
A contract drafted for one tradition can quietly underperform in the other. An English-style agreement — long, exhaustive, written to stand on its own — may include more than a Romanian court needs and yet still miss a protection the Code would otherwise have supplied. A leaner Romanian-style contract, dropped in front of an English court, may find that the gaps it left for the Code to fill simply stay empty.
The drafting consequence
This is general comparative information, not legal advice, and does not create a lawyer–client relationship. The contrasts above are deliberate simplifications; both traditions have important exceptions, and any specific clause needs advice on its own facts.
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