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The long awaited Case-law link under the Collections heading in EUR-Lex is now live, enabling users to browse in case-law. The link goes to tables of the latest documents made available, one for the Court of Justice and one for the Court of First Instance. The table headings are Date, Case, Parties (entirely blank), Type of document, and Text (with the options html or bibliographic notice). The documents are listed in reverse chronological order. Choosing the html text option will display the full text, while the bibliographic notice includes the parties, grounds and operative part of the judgement.
Further down the page there is numerical access to the case law where you enter the year and case number as mandatory fields and select the type of document from a menu, eg Order of the Court.
Additionally there is “Access by year” where you can search for all cases in any year from 1954 onwards and then display the results by month. Browsing through the year is made easier by having a table of all active months at the bottom of the page as well as the list of all cases in the selected month.
At the time of writing no separate search screen has yet been added for this access route, so it appears that further development is still to come. Compare for example the search options restricted to one sector when you look at legislation, preparatory documents or international agreements. However you can achieve the same result by using the main simple search option and limiting your search by “file category” to case-law. Then you can specify which type of document you want, eg judgement, and search by terms. The “parties” option at this point is not yet live but searching for them as subject terms will still pick them up.
As well as case-law the parliamentary questions link under Collections is now fully functioning, instead of simply offering a link to the European Parliament’s own website. It is easier to use too than the EP site as the questions are not separated into different parliamentary terms and held in different places. Simply select the category, for example oral or written – or all, then search by terms, date or time span, author, political group, or EUROVOC keyword.
Progress towards completion of the site is being made but there are some eagerly awaited features, such as LexAlert, which are still outstanding. Can we expect a Christmas present?
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