DISCIPLINARY LIABILITY IN FREE PROFESSIONS

Abstract

The practice of free professions is completely autonomous and therefore disciplinary liability is so important to them. Nowadays, disciplinary law is considered as an internal law, typical to each of free professions, aimed to protect their collective professional interest. There are many regulations of comparative law that are settling behaviours of free professionals. Their objective is to prevent professional mistake. The prevention is always the most important preoccupation of an expertize organization: a disciplinary sanction is undobtedly a failure of a given professional order.

Each profession has regulations of its own, and consequently, its own disciplinary law. The power and structure of a given disciplinary law depend on cohesion of a professional group and its economic and social importance.

The disciplinary liability is a link between professional civil liability and criminal liability; thus in the domain of free professions, certain similarities and differencies between disciplinary liability, on the one hand, and civil and criminal liability, on the other, exist.

The inititial laws or sub-acts of particular free professions more precisely define disciplinary liability. As a rule, codes of professional deontology, and in some professions professional guides, protocols or rules on standardized procedures establish special standards of professsional behaviours.

In the field of disciplinary liability, three groups of questions are posed: disciplinary violations, disciplinary sanctions and disciplinary procedure. The violations for which a disciplinary procedure is initiated and executed are acts incurring violation of duties and reputation of a free profession. The violation is moral, and entailed by behaviour degrading duties and dignity of a profession, even if violations are related to nonprofesssional facts and private life.

Each free profession devises its disciplinary sanctations as an instrument to prevent undesirable forms of professional behaviours. The disciplinary sanctions show both similarities and differencies compared to criminal sanctions.

The elements of both criminal and civil procedure, characteristics of less firm formalism, as well as specialized disciplinary organs make disciplinary procedure a sui generis one.