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FCIL Research Tips for Biddle Librarians

... or What to Do When Gabriela Is Not Around

European Union vs. Council of Europe

The European Union and the Council of Europe are not the same thing, although there are blurred lines between them and patrons researching European legal issues will probably look into both. This is particularly true in the area of human rights, since the European Court of Human Rights is actually a CoE institution, not an EU one.

For a helpful guide to disambiguation, check the CoE's Do Not Get Confused page.

Globalex and ASIL both have excellent guides to researching these organizations and working with their material.

European Union Legislation

EU legislation consists of:
  • Treaties, which supersede national law
  • Regulations, which apply directly to all member states without further state action
  • Directives, which set policy goals but allow states to devise their own means of implementing them
  • Decisions, which bind only the parties addressed
For a good explanation of the EU lawmaking process, see the European Parliament's useful visual guide. Another helpful place to point patrons is the Nutshell on EU law.

EU legislation is readily available on Lexis, Westlaw, and Justis, but I generally direct patrons to the official EU website and its EUR-Lex database because it's free, relatively easy to use, offers authenticated PDFs for most documents, and is updated daily.

1.  If the patron has an Official Journal (OJ) cite to a piece of EU legislation, go to the OJ search page and enter the information into the relevant fields. You should be directed to a page giving you a choice of the document in every EU language and multiple formats, including authenticated PDFs.
  • The OJ is published in two series, L and C. L is for legislative acts and treaties, and C is for everything else (preparatory acts, informations, notices). It helps to choose L or C when searching, but the latest revamp of Eur-Lex eliminated the requirement to enter it.
  • Note that EUR-Lex provides consolidated legislation incorporating subsequent amendments, but it's not official. If the patron is just researching EU law and wants the easy-to-use current version, these are preferable, but source hunters should pull the OJ versions of the law and any relevant amendments.
2.  If they don't have an OJ cite, the new EUR-Lex has enhanced searching functionality, although it's still going to be faster to find the right law if you can pull an OJ number, a CELEX number (the identification system for documents), or title/date information from a secondary source.

3. Since EU law is not codified, the friendliest source for finding legislation by subject is the Summaries of EU Legislation. Drilling down these pages will give the patron an idea of the main laws in that area and how they're structured, and the individual pages do an excellent job of summarizing the law, linking to the main acts, and noting any key amendments.  Unfortunately, they're in the middle of integrating the content into the new EUR-Lex, so this feature may be going away in favor of the less-appealing Directory of EU Legislation in Force, but for the time being it's still useful. 
 
4.  If the patron is looking for legislative history, the new EUR-Lex now puts the full history, with links to the documents, under the "Procedure" tab in the record for the law. You can also conduct keyword searches in the Legislative Procedures area of EUR-Lex (formerly called Pre-Lex). 
 
5. To find national implementing measures for directives, which are not self-executing, follow the instructions on the N-Lex area of EUR-Lex. Note that the measures will be in the original language, not in translation.  

6.  For legislation in progress, go to the European Parliament's Legislative Observatory.

Council of Europe Material

The Council of Europe predates the EU and is twice as large, including observing members like the US. Unlike the EU, it's not a supra-national organization with lawmaking authority over its member states, though CoE membership is the commonly accepted precursor to EU membership.  It's mostly a policy-setting group for European countries and their geographic/ideological neighbors, but it does have influence as a treaty-coordinating body and as a player in human rights through its policy efforts and the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. 

1. Documents of the legislative branch, the Committee of Ministers and Parliamentary Assembly, are readily available on their respective websites.

2. The many CoE-sponsored treaties are available with helpful explanatory statements and status information on the page of its Treaty Office.

3. CoE produces voluminous quantities of surveys, reports and white papers, which can be quite useful for researchers. Since they charge for most of their publications, the best way to access them is mostly in print, and Biddle gets a good quantity of these.  Some will be available for free on the CoE website, e.g. on the pages of its Commissioner for Human Rights.

4. European Court of Human Rights decisions are available in Westlaw, Lexis, Justis and Oxford Reports on International Law (and keyword searching is in fact easier there), but source hunters should be pointed to its website and its HUDOC database for PDFs. The one frequent point of confusion is whether the PDF a student pulled off of HUDOC is the "official" one for Bluebook purposes.  If the case has been published in the official reporter, Reports of Judgments and Decisions, the Bluebook requires they use that version, so point the student to the website for 2007-present and our print volumes for earlier ones. If the case hasn't been published in Reports of Judgments yet, the student can use the HUDOC version.  You can tell if the source hunter's version is from HUDOC because it will be in slip format lacking consecutive pagination.