CASE LAW

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Coverage

The European Court of Justice of the European Union consists of three courts: the Court of Justice, the General Court and the Civil Service Tribunal (created in 2004). OJ OnlinePlus covers all stages of cases from these courts; the initial application through to the Advocate-General's opinion and final judgment or order. It includes documents from sector 6 of Celex (the interinstitutional documentation system for Community law) since 1954 and it delivers judgments, orders, opinions and press information collected every day from the Courts' official website.

• Advocate General opinions and judgments usually reported within 24 hours of appearing online on the Court of Justice's website.
• The French version of a judgment until such time that the English text is available (currently one judgment in four is not immediately translated into English).
• The definitive version of texts as published in the European Court Reports (ECR). These are authentic and, in the event of their differing from the electronic version, are alone to be regarded as authoritative.
• Applications and cases removed from the register abstracted from the Official Journal C series.
• Proceedings of the Court of Justice, the General Court and the Civil Service Tribunal providing a summary of the work of the institution during the previous week: judgments, opinions and new cases.
• Press releases for the most significant cases and events.

Main features / search tips

• The search form provides specific search fields with useful examples to easily access this section of the database.
• Search fields are linked by default by the boolean operator AND.
• Advanced search contains an extensive selection of changeable search fields for expert searching this part of the database (e.g. Concerns can be used for document numbers of legislative acts mentioned in the operative part of the judgment, e.g. 1999/85)
• Superseded judgments and orders are indicated by a red flag .
• A quick link opens the Courts' Diary.
• OJ OnlinePlus is not case sensitive.
• Windows copy & paste functionality (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) can be used in the search form.
• A search term can be any word, phrase or number which may be linked together by Boolean operators, e.g. transport and hazardous waste
• You can use wildcards to find variants of words or to substitute a single letter, e.g. liab* or wom?n
• Dates must be entered in the format yyyy-mm-dd. You can use date operators in Date / Year search field for date range searching, e.g. >1999, 1990-04-30~1993-04-30

Searching ECR publications in OJ OnlinePlus

All case law from the European Court of Justice is published in the European Court Reports (ECR). However, it takes some time before the reports are available. In OJ OnlinePlus some ECR references indicate 0000 as a page reference which indicates that the document has not yet been published. The European Court Reports are divided into three volumes:

• Volume I contains all Court Reports from the Court of Justice since the beginning of this EU institution in 1952.
• Volume II is dated from 1990 and contains all Court Reports from the General Court.
• Volume III is dated from 1994 and contains public Staff Cases treated by the General Court.

Note: To retrieve ECR references use ECR reference field in Advanced Case Law search form, e.g. 2000 ECR I-10065

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