"Nature" without "Law"?! or "Law" without "Nature"?! We have the conviction or at least we believe that the great majority of the respondents answering these questions would agree with the affirmation “Nature needs law too, but also law needs nature!”. Why? For the simple reason that nature is a common “good” of humanity, for its protection is necessary to exist a well defined legal framework which able to contribute to its protection and conservation, which necessitates a permanent actualization taking into account the specific conditions of the protected area. Protecting the nature means protecting of people. Therefore, starting from the basic principle enunciating that “environment protection constitutes the obligation and responsibility of the local and central public authorities, and also of all natural persons or legal entities” and from the principle “Conservation of biodiversity and of ecosystems specific to natural biogeographical background”, the present paper proposes to analyzes the stipulations of the main legislative documents in force in the field of environmetal protection in Romania, applicable to natural habitats of grassland.  Of course, even in the field of nature protection is applicable the well-known principle of law "Specialia generalibus derogant“ (special departs from general), and this is the reason way there will be found generally applicable norms and particularly applicable norms in the area of grassland habitat protection. Also, depending on location of the natural habitat, can be found situations when the available juridical norms are insufficient to assure a special protection regime for that habitat, in this case appearing as very important the role of the authorities and organisms with attributions in the field to permanently actualize the specific legislation by adopting new legislative documents or by modifying and completing those already existing. Taking into account that before adopting a measure is imperiously necessary to study the determinative cause that led to negative phenomenon, a very important role belonging to field studies and researches, their conclusions being a basic instrument in promoting the corrective legal norms and/or the special permissive norms regarding the protection, rational exploitation, organization and arrangement of the natural habitats of grassland in order to assure a favorable status of conservation and development.

natural habitats of grassland; biodiversity; environment legislation

Presentation: oral