EU Judicial Procedures and Case Law Databases: What's Going on and What May Lay Ahead?

Abstract

The raise of computational power, the boost of electronic data storage capabilities, and the growing ubiquitousness of the Internet facilitate the collection of legal information and increases its availability for stakeholders. In this context, EU institutions and key stakeholders are seeking to support initiatives that provide access to legislation and case law. This is considered paramount for economic activities, facilitating access to justice, and upholding the rule of law. This Chapter investigates existing electronic databases created to disseminate case law information on the application of EU judicial procedures and explores these databases ability to improve the application of European procedural instruments, forwarding their use and the creation of a common legal understanding. The analysis addresses also the possibilities opened by e-CODEX to integrated cross-national legal database supported by technology developments. The e-CODEX handled cross-border judicial procedures can lead to digital by default judgments in European uniform procedures. These procedures are based on electronic forms supporting structured data exchange. A database relying on these data may be designed to include not only the judgment data, but also many other data generated during the procedure, which could be used to support ‘smarter’ research for practitioners and interested parties. This can significantly reduce subsequent expert interventions in classifying or anonymizing case law data. Additional data generated by the procedures, but not included in the decisions could also enrich the database. Furthermore, as e-CODEX supports semantic interoperability, much of the structured data is expected to be multilingual by default.