Introduction

Researching the law of any European jurisdiction is often a multi-step process; librarians must first look to the domestic law of the individual jurisdiction, then determine what-if any-impact supranational organizations will have on the analysis. This chapter introduces librarians to the basics of European Union (EU) legal research, and briefly considers the impact of Council of Europe treaties in domestic human rights research. The second half of the chapter provides general guidance on researching the domestic law of a common law or civil law jurisdiction, focusing on how and where to find the law (whether statutes or codes) and cases, generally within the context of the civil versus common law distinction.

The European Union

How the EU Works

Because the EU was primarily created to avoid future inter-Europe wars and to encourage more cross-border cooperation in commercial matters, much of the EU’s legal competencies apply to areas involving commerce of goods and services. The EU is now a leading voice in international affairs and monetary policy, and regulates a number of areas that are often involved in transnational practice, especially competition law and privacy.

The EU has some supranational powers (European Parliament, n.d.), as each member state who signed onto the founding treaty agreed to cede some of their domestic power to the EU. When researching legal issues involving the EU, it is important to consider both the law of the EU itself and any corresponding domestic law on the same topic. For a more detailed overview on the EU’s legal system, The ABC of EU Law (Publication Office of the European Union, 2023) is highly recommended; it is very comprehensive and freely available.

There are three sources of EU law: primary law, general principles of EU law and secondary law (EUR-Lex, n.d.). When researching an EU legal issue, the first step is to identify the relevant treaty provision(s). There have been many treaties over the course of the EU’s history, but the current controlling treaties are the Consolidated Treaty on European Union (TEU), the Consolidated Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.

Once you have identified the relevant treaty provision(s), look for relevant implementing secondary legislation. Secondary legislation is promulgated by the European Parliament, which is made up of elected representatives from each Member State, the amount of which are proportionate to the Member State’s overall population. The European Parliament most often legislates in one of two forms: Regulations, which are immediately binding on all Member States, and Directives, which provide general guidance on how a Member State must amend its existing domestic laws to conform with the outcomes expressed in the Directive. It is very important for researchers looking into Directives to follow up on how a particular country has implemented the Directive in question; a good tool for this is the National Transposition (EUR-Lex, n.d.) information, which can be found linked to the Directive on EUR-Lex.

Beyond this secondary level exists general principles of law, of which case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the primary source. Although considered supplementary, mainly due to the EU’s roots in civil law systems, the CJEU continues to gain more importance as it adjudicates on issues in areas of importance to citizens and corporations outside EU Member States.

The CJEU has three functions: to review the legality of the acts of EU institutions, to ensure that Member States comply with obligations under the Treaties, and to interpret EU law at the request of the national courts and tribunals. The CJEU is composed of two courts: the General Court, which is the trial level or court of first instances; and the Court of Justice of the European Union, which is the appellate level court. Case names that begin with “T” indicate origin in the General Court, and those beginning with “C” indicate origin in the Court of Justice.

Researching the European Union

In researching legal material generated by the EU, you will encounter references to EU treaties, cases, legislation, and policies which you may wish to research in greater detail. The EU maintains a number of freely available websites designed to help you access this information, including:

• The Your Gateway to the European Union (formerly known as Europa) is a good starting point to learn how the EU regulates/legislates a particular issue. It provides general information on how the EU works, and includes links to other relevant EU websites for more detailed knowledge. The “Actions by topic” entries are particularly useful for gaining an overview of various EU activities; each topical entry provides links to the relevant EU bodies which regulate that area, and to the relevant legislation which controls in that area. These can be found in the “Priorities and actions” menu.
• Summaries of EU Legislation from EUR-Lex is an excellent place to start if you are unsure of the relevant legislation in any particular area of EU activity, and is often linked from the Gateway pages mentioned above. If starting directly with the Summaries page, simply choose the topic that best fits your area and then browse through the relevant sub-topics to locate commentary and citations to controlling legislation for that topic. Note that you may need more background information on the area of law you are researching to fully understand the terminology used in this source.
• EUR-Lex provides free and easy access to authentic versions of EU treaties, legislation, cases, preparatory documents, and international agreements to which the EU is a party. The main page features a full-text search option, but if you already have a citation you can retrieve by entering the relevant information in the “Find results by document number” box on the right-hand side of the screen, making sure to select the relevant type of document for which you are searching.

EUR-Lex also features separate pages for compilations of EU treaties, which list all current treaties in force as well as former versions, and is the easiest way to retrieve the consolidated full text.

The Official Journal of the European Union is the official publication source of EU legislation and other official documentation. To retrieve an item in the Official Journal using its OJ citation, or to browse recent Official Journal issues in their entirety, it is best to do so directly from Access the Official Journal (EUR-Lex) page, rather than by searching the main EUR-Lex page. Note that as of July 1, 2013, only the electronic version of the Official Journal (“e-OJ”) is considered authentic and has legal force.

Although case opinions from the CJEU can be found on EUR-Lex, the Court maintains its own repository of case opinions on Curia. There are two main benefits to using Curia over EUR-Lex for case opinions; first, Curia provides an excellent advanced search feature which allows users to search by a variety of facets, including judge, nationality of the party, and subject matter. Second, Curia is more likely than EUR-Lex to provide either the official reported version of the opinion or the citation indicating where that official version can be located. Note that as of 2012, the Court of Justice now publishes its cases exclusively online using a “European Case Law Identifier” (ECLI) number; the European Court Reports (ECR) is no longer published. Cases can be retrieved using the ECLI in the advanced search menu.

The Council of Europe

The Council of Europe (COE) is an international organization that protects and furthers human rights throughout Europe. Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, it includes 47 member states.

Both the COE and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), an early precursor to what became the EU, were founded in the late 1940s. These organizations reflect the desire of their founding members to pursue pan-European organization and unity to further economic and political stability in the region.

The COE’s roots were established at the Hague during a 1948 meeting of politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and other high-profile figures from across Europe. Working groups determined what this new organization would look like from economic, political, and cultural standpoints, focusing on how to further peace, prosperity, and unity across the region while still allowing the individual member states to maintain their sovereignty.

From these negotiations, a founding document was eventually created. The Statute of the Council of Europe, also known as the Treaty of London (signed on May 5, 1949) provides the organization’s framework. Its original signatories are the COE’s founding members: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Under Article 1, the aim of the COE is “to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realizing the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress.” The treaty requires member states to “accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment of all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms[.]”

All COE member states are signatories to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, known as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was completed in Rome in 1950. The ECHR guarantees human rights protections to people in COE member states.

Judicial Body: European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is the COE’s judicial body. It receives applications from individuals and states to hear and decide on cases involving potential violations of civil or political rights protected by the ECHR.

The court’s judges come from each of the 47 COE member states, and are elected to the court by the COE’s Parliamentary Assembly. Each judge serves one non-renewable nine-year term.

Finding ECtHR Cases

The easiest first option for finding ECtHR case law is to use the court’s HUDOC online database (open access), which has an advanced search option with many searchable fields, including the following:

When using the Google site search feature to search the HUDOC database, the following search query syntax generally works well:

“police act” site:hudoc.echr.coe.int

Note, however, that the top search results for this kind of Google search may be press releases from the court, rather than actual opinions.

Legislative Body: Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) consists of elected parliamentarians from the 47 COE member states, and represents the European people rather than European governments. It meets four times per year, and develops initiatives to monitor human rights protections in the member states.

The PACE public documents online database (open access) includes adopted texts (recommendations, resolutions, and opinions), working documents (such as committee reports, motions, written declarations, and written questions), and verbatim records.

Researching the Law of Individual Countries in Europe

Beyond the supranational law of the EU and the COE, every European country has its own body of domestic law. Most countries in Europe are considered civil law jurisdictions, but, notably, the United Kingdom and Ireland follow a common law system.

Researching the law of any country is a complex process which will most likely require the assistance of an expert; the Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) maintains a listing of specialists willing to assist with research questions for a variety of jurisdictions on its Jumpstart Your Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Research webpage.

A good, free source for starting research on the law of almost any country in the world is GlobaLex (open access). And a useful tool for helping to decode legal citation for select countries outside the US can be found in Table 2, or T2, of the Bluebook (open access), the leading system of legal citation in the US.

Unfortunately, there are currently no useful cross-jurisdictional databases, but the EU’s N-lex attempts to provide a single entry point to the national law databases of individual EU countries. Member states continue to work on N-lex’s multi-jurisdictional search, which would allow users to search and compare law simultaneously in two or more EU countries using automatic translation technology, but at the time of writing this is not yet a recommended resources.

Locating the relevant sources for any jurisdiction, however, is only half the battle; you must understand the underlying structure of the target legal system to fully appreciate and apply the information you’ve found. The following sections address how to approach researching both a civil and a common law jurisdiction.

Legal Research for European Civil Law Jurisdictions

Most European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, are civil law jurisdictions, meaning the foundation of their legal tradition is centered in Roman rather than English law.

This distinction is most noticeable regarding judicial opinions.

• In civil law countries, the general rule is that law is created exclusively through legislation-the enactment of statutes and codes by a legislative body.
• While courts in these countries are highly engaged in the interpretation of laws and the enforcement of legal obligations, they are not actively involved in the creation of new law, and opinions issued by their judges are generally not binding on anyone other than the parties directly involved in the litigation. While it is true that a country like Germany does not have judge-made law in that all courts are bound by the decisions of the country’s highest court, the decisions from the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) are often cited in lower court decisions, and it is widely understood that these decisions are to be given a significant amount of deference as indicators of how legal controversies can and will be resolved in future legal proceedings. Furthermore, while the Federal Court of Justice is not itself bound by its own precedent, in practice it values the legal certainty that comes from ruling consistently across cases, and generally does so accordingly.

What does this mean for researchers who are well-versed in common law systems?

• Because judge-made law is such an important element of common law legal systems, legal research for jurisdictions like the US, Canada, England, and Australia is highly focused on court cases .
• While reading court cases in civil law jurisdictions can be helpful and enlightening, legal research for those countries is much more focused on statutes and codes (“primary” sources) and the treatises and periodical articles that analyze and explain them (“secondary” sources).

Language Concerns

Despite English being a Germanic language, the development of legal English was largely influenced by French. This means it is easier for native English speakers to understand legal terms in Romance languages, and much more difficult for them to decipher legal German.

The chart below illustrates this point, comparing terms related to legislation:

This is also evident when comparing terms related to the judiciary:

In German, “Fall” is used to describe a case in academic or scholarly writing, while in legal practice a case is often referred to by the term “Sache.”

Researchers should not expect to find legal resources from European jurisdictions readily available in English, and should consider English-language translations a rare exception rather than a general rule.

Machine translation services like Google Translate or Deep-L can be helpful if you need a quick translation of a few terms or a second opinion regarding your understanding of a longer legal text. Translations generated by these tools should not, however, be considered sufficient for in-depth analysis of legal texts. Remember as well that English translations of laws are essentially never considered to be authoritative.

Legal Research Methodology

Rather than jumping right into statutes and cases, you should always start legal research projects with secondary sources, which explain and analyze the law and cite primary legal materials. Even researchers with native-level fluency in the language of the jurisdiction will find this technique helpful, if not necessary, if for no reason other than to familiarize themselves with important concepts and terms.

Legal secondary sources vary in length and complexity. Sound legal research practice dictates consulting them in the following order:

While legal subscription databases like Westlaw and Lexis provide the richest selection of secondary sources, they are not necessary for basic legal research tasks. Many general academic libraries subscribe to the database HeinOnline (subscription resource), one of the most important resources available to researchers of both domestic and foreign law.

When consulting legal secondary materials, be sure to note any citations to primary sources like cases and statutes. Include in your notes any letters and numbers that you see, regardless of how relevant you think they might be. The more citation information you are able to glean from secondary sources, the easier it will be to find the primary materials you are looking for.

Legal Research Example

Assume that you have been asked by a library user for assistance in researching German domestic laws related to data protection. The researcher is fairly knowledgeable about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but is really interested in Germany’s domestic law on this topic.

The researcher has a very elementary knowledge of German and would prefer to consult materials in English.

Note that Gesetze im Internet is a free online database of German laws currently in force. It is maintained by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Justice and Consumer Protection, and includes non-official English translations of selected German laws.

Legal Research for European Common Law Jurisdictions

The two major common law jurisdictions in Europe are the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland; Malta and Cyprus incorporate some aspects of common law into their systems. In addition to adhering to a precedent-based common law system, all common law jurisdictions feature some sort of Parliamentary legislative body.

Finding Cases in Common Law Jurisdictions

As case law precedent is a key primary source in common law jurisdictions, it is helpful to understand how to decode a case citation and where to retrieve a copy of the judicial decision. A useful source for understanding legal citation in the UK is OSCOLA, while in Ireland researchers use OSCOLA Ireland.

Common law case citations are generally formatted using the neutral citation of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR) or following a published reporter citation system of party names, year, report volume, and page. A single case can be published in more than one print reporter, and the abbreviations for common law print reporters can be daunting to the non-legal researcher; a good guide for decoding these abbreviations is the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.

Case in a print reporter: Shea v. Allison [2010] 3 I.R. 57

Comparatively, a neutral citation can be provided for the exact same case, and is often preferred as it assumes no access to any of the (fee-based) print reporters mentioned above:

Case with a neutral citation: Shea v. Allison [2010] IESC 23

Because the volume of case law in most common law jurisdictions is far less than what is seen in the US, it is not always necessary to have access to fee-based case law databases. One excellent freely available resource for British and Irish case law is BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute).

BAILII is part of the World Legal Information Institutes (WorldLII), which advocate for free, independent, and non-profit access to worldwide law for a variety of jurisdictions. Started in 1997 by an Australian law professor, and now loosely governed by the Free Access to Law Movement, all “LIIs” have varying levels of support/funding, which leads to variance in quality and updates. BAILII, however, has been consistent in its coverage and functionality over the past 20 years, and remains highly recommended for casual researchers looking to retrieve a case by citation. At the time of writing, the British government is working to transfer case law reporting competencies to the National Archives’ Find Case Law database. As of 2022, this database is still in the Alpha stage and cannot yet be considered a comprehensive resource for UK cases.

Across all common law jurisdictions, the availability and scope of judicial decisions on the websites of the individual courts that produce them varies so greatly that it is difficult to make a blanket recommendation on their use; with very recent decisions, however, going directly to the court’s own website could be another option.

Finding Legislation in Common Law Jurisdictions

The majority of common law systems do not codify their legislation, so it remains fairly easy to retrieve a piece of legislation by title using the country’s official legislative portal. Current common law legislation is fairly standard in its format:

British Museum Act 1963, c.24

It is important for the non-law researcher to note that legislation is routinely updated, so be sure to determine whether the version you’ve obtained is the current version of the legislation and whether any relevant amendments have been incorporated. In both the UK and the Republic of Ireland, subsequent amendments may be made by other Acts or Statutory Instruments.

In the UK, you can easily use Legislation.gov.uk to pull up a copy of the British Museum Act of 1963 simply by filling in the title (“British Museum Act”) and year (1963). This link, and the Irish Statute Book for the Republic of Ireland, are very simple to use, and often will come up as a top result simply after googling the name of an Act. Note that both are official government sites and authoritative sources of their respective domestic legislation.

To track legislation currently in progress, turn to the parliament of the jurisdiction to find information on current bills being considered along with useful legislative history in the form of white papers, hearings, debates, or other reports. Across Commonwealth jurisdictions, recordings of parliamentary debates in common law jurisdictions are referred to as the Hansard.

It is important to note that some UK jurisdictions have devolved powers, which allow them to create legislation in their own parliaments. This means that Acts of Parliament (Westminster) may or may not apply to the whole of the UK. Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales each have their own devolved parliaments which can legislate on certain devolved issues. For details on devolved powers, see:

• Devolved and Reserved Powers: Find out about the powers of the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament
• Devolved Areas [for the Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament]
• What are the powers of the Northern Ireland Assembly

References and Recommended Readings

Council of Europe. n.d. “The Statute of the Council of Europe. Treaty of London. 1949.” Accessed May 15, 2023. https://rm.coe.int/1680306052.

EUR-Lex. n.d. “Sources of European Union law.” Last modified April 4, 2022. Accessed May 15, 2023. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/sources-of-european-union-law.html.

European Commission. n.d. “The European Union. What it is and what it does. Accessed May 15, 2023. https://op.europa.eu/webpub/com/eu-what-it-is/en/.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Communication. Borchardt, K. 2018. The ABC of EU law. Publications Office. Accessed May 15, 2023. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2775/953190.

European Court of Human Rights. n.d. “European Convention on Human Rights. 1953. Accessed May 15, 2023. https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/convention_eng.pdf.

European Parliament. n.d. “Fact Sheets on the European Union. Supranational decision-making procedures.” Accessed May 15, 2023. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/erpl-app-public/factsheets/pdf/en/FTU_1.2.3.pdf.