Identifiers, Metadata and Document Structures: Essential Ingredients for Inter-European Case Law Search

After establishing the need for cross-border dissemination of national (EC) law, this paper reviews already existing initiatives like JuriFast, Dec.Nat, Caselex and Jure.

For future development three basic challenges are defined and elaborated. The lack of a unique and persistent case law identifier gives rise to many problems when citing and searching case law. The paper describes the way this issue is tackled in the Netherlands, by using a national identifier together with a publicly available reference-index. Inspired by the advantages of this system, a proposal is made for a European Case Law Identifier.

To facilitate the inter-European search for, and exchange of case law the paper also discusses the need for a harmonized set of metadata, and the necessity to develop a European interchange format for court decisions.