The Legal Regime of Trader's Liability, Regulated by the Laws on Consumer Protection - a New Paradigm

The traders are assigned ex lege a number of acknowledged professional obligations, like the obligation of registering in the Trade Register. Besides these traditional obligations, new and complex obligations have been regulated for traders, obligations that are specific to the tradersconsumers relation. These regulations are subordinated to the Consumer Law domain, which in Romania represents a contemporary creation, a result of the process of transposing the communautaire acquis. Consumer protection is regulated by general and specific rules, the latter ones referring to the following sub domains: advertising; informing about the prices of the products offered to the consumers for sale; unfair clauses from the contracts concluded between the traders and the consumers; the contracts negotiated away from business premises; concluding and executing distant contracts related to financial services; consumer credit; packages of tourism services; protection of the contracts related to the right to use some immovable goods for a limited period- timeshare; selling of the products and warranties associated; general safety of the products; responsibility of the producers for the damages generated by the defective products; unfair commercial practices and ways to cease the unlawful practices in respect of the protection of consumers’ collective interests. New obligations for the traders are established through the content of both general and specific regulations, obligations that are effected in imperatives and especially in interdictions.The legal regime of the obligations that resulted this way transcend the regime of the traders’ traditional obligations, making up the new paradigm of the traders’ activity and it represents the theme of this paper. Our research focused on determining the obligations set-up for the traders through both categories of rules and through their legal regime. As a result of the research carried on this theme, we conclude that setting-up this new category of obligations for the traders represents an actual means of achieving the aim of ensuring the consumer protection, adding-up to other legal means set-up in this regard.