Abstract: The issue of the involvement of lawyers in establishing and consolidating totalitarian regimes is often neglected, although it presents both theoretical and practical relevance in testing the strength lines and resistance structures of the Rechtsstaat (i.e., Rule-of-Law-government), by revealing the mechanisms of the perversion of law by the supporters of ideologically motivated claims and tendencies. The judgment on the conduct of lawyers in times of totalitarian rule must be formed by assessing their public positions and by the publications they wrote during those years. By the same token, the evaluation is to be made regard to the social and political background and to the fact that the discourse of an academic jurist addresses by necessity those in positions of public power or the persons whose authority is legitimized by and derived from the existing power. Consequently, the deferential theoretical attitude towards the new political order or even the formal and emphatic act of adherence to the ideological principles of the day or the lip-service thereto are not so relevant as the omission to embrace explicitly such opinions, the eschew from treating some themes or the swift and unspectacular treating of institutions and principles that are not in tune with the political ethos of the day.

Keywords: law and politics; Romania 1938-1944; authoritarian government; Constantin C. Angelescu;