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The relatively small number of cases allowed to the Romanian system of public health to resist well to the epidemy of COVID 19, at least up to the beginning of May, when this study is drafted. However, the restrictions of travelling and social isolation measures took in order to reach this result strongly affected the economic and social life of the country. The President instituted the emergency state; several restrictions in the exercise of fundamental rights and economic freedoms were adopted; they caused the lockdown of a lot of businesses, which entailed a vertiginous economic crisis.
In respect of the ongoing contracts, the consequences of such measures may be qualified under the concepts of general contract law applying to the occurrence of unforeseen circumstances impacting the performance of contracts (such as risks theory, fait du prince, force majeure, hardship, adaption, suspension or cessation of the contract). When the government or the lawgiver estimated that the application of this general law would have unjust or undesirable consequences for the economic or social balances, they intervened by norms modifying those consequences in specific hypothesis or fields of industry.
This study presents the general law of unforeseeable circumstances, as provided by the Civil Code of 2011, as well as the problems that might result from articulating this general framework with specific rules issued on relation to COVID 19 epidemic crisis in respect of services contracts, sales, leases, loans and specific protection of small or medium businesses
