Hello, it's Charlie from Oxford Brookes University library.
Let's look at how to find EU cases and legislation.
This video will show you how you can find EU cases and legislation on either Westlaw or EUR-Lex.
You may not have come across EUR-Lex before so I'll show you some of the things you can do
and show you how you can learn more. As always I'll wrap up by showing you
where you can develop your skills and where you can find help and support.
Hopefully you've already used Westlaw to find English cases or legislation using the 'cases' tab
and 'legislation' tab. To find EU materials we don't use these tabs
but instead click on EU in the blue bar. This blue bar runs along the top of every page in Westlaw.
When you click on EU you'll be taken to this search page. You can use as many or
as few of these search boxes as you like. If you don't have a particular document in mind
but just wanted to search for a word or phrase then you can use the 'free text' box.
Let's imagine that you found a reference to this case in your EU law textbook.
All EU cases start with a case number and this is usually the simplest way to find a case.
So I take that case number C-170/96 and type it into the 'case or document no' box.
The only other thing I need to do is tick the 'cases' box near the bottom
before clicking 'search'. Simple. We can do a similar thing to find legislation.
EU legislation such as Directives, Recommendations and Decisions tend to have very long names as
this example illustrates. Let's assume your lecturer used this example in a lecture slide
and you want to find it for yourself. Happily to find this all we need to make note of is: firstly,
what type of legislation it is. It will say this at the start. Here we can see it's a Decision.
Secondly we need to make a note of the document's number. Here it is 2021/1.
So armed with those two bits of information I head to the EU search page on Westlaw. Again i use the
'case or document no' box and I type in 2021/1. The second thing I need to do is to use the
alphabetical drop-down list under 'document type' to find the word 'decision'. I then hit 'search'.
Before we leave Westlaw I just wanted to share one of my favorite features - folders. Down the
right hand side of any document on Westlaw, keep an eye out for this folder icon. By clicking this
you can stash the document away in a folder so you can come back to it later.
You may want to have a separate folder for each module or assignment. From any page in
Westlaw you'll see the word 'folders' in the top right. This will take you to all those
documents you have saved. This is great because you don't need to search for them every time.
Aside from Westlaw, another useful tool for finding EU documents is EUR-Lex.
Have a go at using both and see which you find easier.
EUR-Lex is produced and maintained by the European Union and is their
official source of EU legal documents. I've popped a link to EUR-Lex below this video.
One handy link on the EUR-Lex home page is to all the EU treaties.
You can search for them one-by-one on Westlaw
but it's a good time saver to know that they're all listed in one place on EUR-Lex.
The second thing I want to draw your attention to is this 'find results by document number' box
down the right of the EUR-Lex home page.
As you'll see in a moment we can use this to find EU cases and EU legislation.
Remember this? This was the legislation that I showed you how to find on Westlaw. Again
we can ignore the long title and just use the information at the start of the reference to find
this document. It's got the number 2021/1. This means it was the first decision published in 2021.
Unlike in Westlaw we need to separate out the year and the number in EUR-Lex. Can you see how
I've put 2021 in the year box and then 1 in the number box? Just like on Westlaw we then pick
'decision' from the drop-down list before clicking on the search icon.
It's a very similar process for finding a case. See how the case number is 170/96?
this means it was the 170th case from 1996. So again I use the year box and the number box
and slot those two numbers in. Again I say that it's a case, using the drop down box.
You may be wondering why I keep using this little box down the side of the home page rather than the
big search box at the top. There's a huge number of documents available on EUR-Lex. If I put my
case number in the search box it would give me every document that mentions that case number.
Sure, one of them would be the case I want but it will be buried amongst lots of other documents.
I find that if I'm looking for a particular document and I have the document number then
the 'find results by document number' box is the quickest way to get to that document.
But, of course, if you don't have a particular document in mind but just want to search for
a topic or a word and see what's out there then the quick search box is super useful.
EUR-Lex have made their own series of videos showing you different things you can do,
and sharing some good search tips and hacks. I've linked to their playlist below this video.
One good tip is to make the most of the information in your EU law textbook. If you
look at the front there are really comprehensive lists of key cases, Directives, treaties etc.
These references all contain things like the document number or case number
so you can now quickly look up these important resources for yourself on westlaw or EUR-Lex.
If you want to dig a bit deeper into EU law there is a section on the law page of
the library website dedicated to this - again the link is below. And don't forget that you
can always come and talk to me. If you're still confused about finding EU sources or if you want
to push yourself further then book a one-to-one with me we can then walk through this together.