EuroCases

Overview

EuroCases is a unique multilingual web-based legal informational service providing access to case law of the leading jurisdictions in Europe related to the application of European Union law. It is maintained and continuously updated by the leading Bulgarian legal information provider Apis (www.apis.bg). EuroCases builds upon the achievements of the affiliated company Apis Hristovich Ltd. within the EUCases project (http://eucases.eu) supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for research and innovation of the European Union.

The main adavantage of the service lies in its cross-border nature – in cases where provisions of EU law should be applied, users can draw inspiration and ideas by using relevant case law of other jurisdictions, which is not offered by their national service providers.

Intended users

EuroCases is addressing the needs of tens of thousands of highly qualified legal professionals in Europe, such as lawyers, judges, in-house legal counsel and legal advisers in the public administration, whose professional activities are closely connected to the application of the EU law. The service is designed to meet their specific needs by enabling them to access national case law from other Member States whereby national courts apply both national and European law as well as principles developed by the Court of Justice of the EU  in order to decide a case pending before them.

In that regard EuroCases would be very useful by familiarizing users with the way courts, by applying EU law and the jurisprudence of the CJEU, deal with national cases. In addition, parties to the cases and their lawyers can take other MS courts' arguments into account in a particular case in order to clarify a legal issue, especially when there are no or only a limited number of domestic courts’ rulings dealing with this issue. Finally, EuroCases is an excellent tool for legal researchers (and practitioners as well) to assist them when doing comparative legal research.

Content scope

National and European case law is covering the following 19 thematic areas of EU law:

Main features

EuroCases is offering a number of valuable functions to facilitate legal research and to assist users in navigation and exploration of its large multilingual database:

• Fast and intelligent “Quick search” – users can search by document number, keywords or common names of cases (e.g. “van Gend and Loos” case) or EU legal instruments (e.g. “Water Framework Directive”). The relevant documents appear instantly at the top of the results’ list .
• Precise and highly efficient “Advanced search” – a very useful, sophisticated search functionality allowing users to perform detailed search queries by using one or more search criteria:
  • By document collection – EU legislation, EU case law or national case law
  • By jurisdiction – country and court rendered the ruling
  • By document number – CELEX number, ELI or ECLI identifier, national identifier (case number or act number)
  • By date or time period – date of document, publication, entry into force, end of validity, transposition, notification, signature
  • By cited legal instrument or its provision – users can search for all cases referring to a given EU legal instrument or to a particular provision of it .
  • By classification headings – terms of the thematic classifiers Directory of EU legislation, Directory of EU case law, EuroVoc, Subject matter and EuroCases classifier.
  • By keywords or phrases using Boolean operators – AND, OR, NOT, NEAR
• Display of keywords and case summaries already in the results list – this feature helps users to quickly assess and identify the most relevant court decisions in the list of search results
• Filtering search results by various criteria – jurisdiction, type of document, classification headings
• Multilingual interface – the user interface is available in 5 languages: English, French, German, Italian and Bulgarian
• Cross-links between documents – more than 18 millions of links between legislative and judicial documents have been established in EuroCases, thus allowing users to search documents by references, e.g. cases referring to a given provision of EU legal instrument or national cases referring to a judgment of the EU Court of Justice
• Aggregation of data from multiple sources – EuroCases collects data from more than 50 national and European sources
• Links to source publication – users can see the original text, published by the source by clicking the link to its publication under each document
• Personalisation features for improving customer experience – EuroCases provides several functions aiming at improving customer satisfaction when using the service: “Recent documents”, “My documents” and “My searches”.

Languages

Presently, the interface of the service is available in 5 languages: English, French, German, Italian and Bulgarian. EU legislation and case law documents are provided in English, French, German and Bulgarian. National cases are available in the languages of the case, but the keywords, summaries and other bibliographic data are provided in English, German and/or French.

Data collections

EuroCases provides access to more than 720,000 legislative and judicial documents grouped in three document collections:

National case law

National case law collection comprises more than 150,000 decisions of national courts as follows:

• About 130,000 rulings with relevance to EU law of the Supreme courts and partially of lower instance courts of Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany and the United Kingdom (dating back to 1959) – the vast majority of these decisions are available in full text with identified internal links to EU provisions and judgements of the EU Court of Justice
• More than 20,000 rulings linked to EU law of jurisdictions from all other EU Member States (except Croatia) – some of these decisions (mainly rulings rendered before 2000) may not be avaliable in ful text, but will have bibliographic annotations and metadata.

The texts of the national decisions are available in the language of the case. However, most important cases are supplied with editorial summaries, keyword annotations and classification headings in English, German and/or French.

Click here for more information about source jurisdictions.

EU case law

EuroCases service offers access to the full texts of more than 20,000 rulings (dating back to 1954) of the three courts, comprising the Court of Justice of the European Union:

• Court of Justice
• General Court
• Civil Service Tribunal.

The rulings of the Court of Justice and the general Court are available in 4 language versions – English, German, French and Bulgarian.

EU legislation

A full-text data collection with more than 120,000 legal acts of EU primary and secondary legislation as well as international agreements:

• Primary legislation:
  • Treaties currently in force
  • Founding treaties
  • Accession treaties
  • Other treaties (e.g. the amending treaties) and protocols
• Secondary legislation:
  • Regulations
  • Directives
  • Decisions
  • Other binding or non-binding legal instruments
• International agreements:
  • Agreements with non-member States or international organisations
  • Agreements between Member States
  • Acts of bodies created by international agreements
  • Other acts

All acts in EU legislation document collection are available in 4 language versions – English, German, French and Bulgarian.

Data sources

EuroCases service aggregates and re-uses data from a variety of EU and national legal sources.

Editorial added value

Experienced editors annotate on a daily basis recent judgments with EU relevance of the leading jurisdictions in Austria, France, Germany and the United Kingdom by adding keywords and classification headings. Summaries of the most important cases are drafted in the language of the case and translated in English.

Pricelist

Note: The Academic pack is primarily meant for universities, educational institutions and libraries. Furthermore, the Academic pack is IP restricted, so EuroCases cannot be accessed outside the premises of the library.  When using the Academic pack, the access to EuroCases is purely IP based. Therefore, the user will not need a username or password to access the database.  

If you want to purchase a different number of licences or the Academic pack, please contact us, so we can arrange the transaction and send you an invoice:

e-mail: office@eurocases.eu

Phone: (+359 2) 408 01 40