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Find EU Materials: EU Case Law

EU Case Law on the Web

The Court of Justice of the European Union houses two adjudicative bodies:

  • The Court of Justice: Comprised of one judge from each member state and 11 Advocates General, the Court's jurisdiction includes requests by member states seeking preliminary rulings interpreting EU law, actions regarding member state fulfillment of EU obligations, requests seeking annulment of actions undertaken by EU bodies (or review of a failure to act), and appeals from the General Court.
  • The General Court (formerly the Court of First Instance):  comprised of two judges from each member state, handles disputes brought by individuals against EU entities, by member states against the Commission, and other matters not reserved for the Court of Justice.

The Civil Service Tribunal sat from 2004 to 2016, at which time its jurisdiction was transferred to the General Court.


Court Homepage/InfoCuria

Searches for case materials using the form available on the Court's homepage launch its case law document database, InfoCuria.

For each CJEU case InfoCuria will typically provide links to both HTML and PDF versions of its full orders, judgments, and opinions, along with a case summary, and links to laws and cases cited therein.  The case record may also offer links to reports surrounding the case published in the European Union's Official Journal in EUR-Lex.


EUR-Lex

Researchers may also search for case law in EUR-Lex using several strategies:

  • Browsing cases by subject in the directory of case law,
  • Browsing cases by year and entity in the digital reports
  • Browsing cases by court, document type, year (and case number, if known), in the EUR-Lex case law database holding orders, judgments, and opinions, or
  • Searching for cases from the main search bar, or using the Advanced Search page and filtering by "Document reference," "EU court case," or "Author of document," "Court of Justice of the European Union."

EU Case Law in Commercial Databases