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The European Union is an international organization, created by a series of treaties (primary legislation) that grant to the organization a unique degree of power to create laws (secondary legislation) that are directly binding within the national jurisdictions comprising the E.U. Since the Treaty of Accession came into force on 5/1/2004, there are now 25 member states, which are listed at Europe -European Countries.
There are four principal bodies within the EU The Council is the body that adopts legislation. It is composed of the heads of government of the member nations, though in fact it is often composed of cabinet ministers responsible for the area of policy under discussion. The Council can adopt legislation on its own initiative, but generally responds to proposals of the Commission. The Commission is composed of 20 directorates, each with jurisdiction over a given area of policy. Each directorate is headed by a directorate general. Hence, the Commission is technically composed of 20 members. However, the Commission is supported by a vast body of professional administrators and policy experts, who provide institutional and political continuity to the E.U. The principal functions of the Commission are to initiate policy, propose legislation, and to administer legislation after it is adopted. The Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance enforce legislation through decisions that are directly binding within the legal systems of the member nations. Finally, the European Parliament plays a secondary, indirect role in the legislative process.
The EU maintains an official web site, called Europa. There is a link to Europa from the Law Library's Online Resources page. Europa now contains a great deal of useful information about the E.U., as well as more than 1,000,000 documents in PDF or HTML format. The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to the sources you will find at Europa, as well as printed sources you will need in order to conduct comprehensive research on E.U. law and policy.
There is an immense secondary literature on the EU Much of it is composed of monographic literature on specific topics, such as free movement of goods and services, European competition law, etc. Both the Main Library and the Law Library have substantial collections of this secondary literature classified generally under KJE. The best method of locating this material with IUCAT is to do title keyword searches, then link from retrieved items to appropriate subject headings. Subject headings are tricky to search directly because they often substitute American legal terminology for European terminology (e.g., "antitrust" in place of "competition"), and because the geographic subdivision may be either "European Economic Community Countries" or "European Union Countries." Once you have searched IUCAT, you might want to search Eureka or Worldcat, which are union catalogs of books held by libraries around the world. Using the same keywords and subject terms that were successful in IUCAT, you can therefore expand your search to include monographs that are not in the IU collections. There are links to Eureka and Worldcat at the Main Library and Law Library web sites.
There are also a number of introductory overviews of the entire body of European law. Single volume works include, e.g., EU Law: Text, Cases, and Materials (3rd ed), by Craig and DeBurca (KJE947 .C73 2002), Foundations of European Community Law (5th ed.), by Hartley (KJE947 .H37 2003), Wyatt & Dashwood's European Union Law (5th ed., KJE947 .W93 2006), and Introduction to the Law of the European Communities (3rd ed.), by Gormley (KJE947 .K36313 1998). The Law of the European Union, by Smit and Herzog (KJE947 .S63), is a multi-volume looseleaf treatise on the law of the European Economic Community, organized by treaty article. This title is shelved in the Reserve area of the Library.
There is also an immense literature on EU law in legal periodicals. The two standard indexes to American and selected foreign, English-language journals are LegalTrac and WilsonWeb. Both are available through links on the Library's Online Resources page. Both indexes provide extensive coverage back to 1980, but must be used at the Library, since they are accessible only through the Library's computers. HeinOnline is another legal periodical index, which provides full-text PDF versions of American law review articles going back many years before 1980. However, the coverage is more selective.
Foreign legal periodicals can be searched through the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, which the researcher can link to from the Library's Online Resources page. This database includes citations to articles published since 1984 in over 550 legal journals from around the world. However, many of the articles indexed are in languages other than English. Finally, the Westlaw database contains the Legal Journals Index (LJI), which includes citations to a large number of English-language articles on EU law, published in British and English-language, European legal journals.
The European Research Papers Archive (ERPA), is a database of almost 800 working papers on European Integration, funded by the Commission of the EU.
In its present form, the EU is the product of a number of treaties, dating back to 1957. Europa provides access to the treaties at the Europa Treaties Web site. The most important treaties include the following:
(1) The Treaty Establishing the European Community (so-called "Rome treaty," signed in 1957) created the "common market," and still governs the law relating to the economic integration of Europe. The EEC treaty created the basic institutions, namely the Council, Commission, and Court of Justice. It has been amended several times, most importantly by the Single European Act (1986), which added a "co-operation procedure," intended to increase opportunities for participation of the European Parliament in the law-making process, and by the Treaty of European Union.
(2) The Treaty of European Union ("Maastricht treaty," 1992) embedded the EEC (now renamed the European Community) in a broader framework, of which the EC is merely one of three "pillars." The TEU introduced a mechanism of inter-governmental co-operation to create additional pillars relating to common foreign and security policy and a common justice and home affairs policy. In addition to potentially broadening the scope of EU competence, the TEU also introduced the complex principle of subsidiarity, according to which the institutions of the EU are to defer to national law-making institutions in matters of joint jurisdiction, unless the objectives of proposed policy can manifestly be better accomplished by community-wide legislation. The TEU itself has been amended by the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) and the Treaty of Nice (2001). The former added a co-decision procedure for Parliament and Council, added a new title on employment, inserted the Social Chapter into the main body of the treaty, and expanded the use of qualified majority voting in the Council. It also renumbered both the EC treaty and the TEU. The latter extended qualified voting even further in anticipation of further expansion to 25 member states.
This compilation of treaties includes both amended and unamended versions. The treaties are available in print as well. In the Reserves Collection the researcher will find a commercially published, multi-volume looseleaf, entitled Encyclopedia of European Union Law. (KJE926 .E52) Part I includes consolidate versions of the TEU and EC treaty. Part III includes versions of various treaties as originally adopted. Part II and Part IV contain helpful introductions to the community institutions and the three "pillars" created by the treaties.
The evolution of EU primary legislation has increasingly been directed by inter-governmental conferences, or IGCs, which sponsor negotiations between member governments outside of the framework of the EU's procedures and institutions. Documents generated by the more recent IGCs are available at the Europa IGC web site (1996 and 2000). These documents can be useful as travaux preparatoires, or legislative history, of the treaties they relate to.
Following the 2001 Laeken European Council meeting, a convention was established to draft a constitutional treaty. The Council then convened an IGC on October 4, 2003, to consider the convention's draft treaty, which it adopted in June, 2004. France and The Netherlands subsequently rejected the draft treaty, causing all remaining nations to postpone consideration indefinitely. However, the text of the draft treaty is still available at the European constitutional convention web site. A larger collection of documents relating to the convention, draft treaty, and the ratification process, are available at the Futurum web site. At the European Council of 2000, the EU adopted a Charter of Fundamental Rights, available at the web site of the Council of the European Union. This charter adds fundamental social rights to the personal rights, such as free movement of workers and freedom to provide services, already entrenched in the TEU.
Secondary legislation is adopted according to a variety of different procedures. The most common of these procedures are consultation (document code CNS), cooperation (SYN), and co-decision (COD). These procedures are distinguished from one another by the fact that the different institutions play different roles depending on the subject matter concerned. A summary of which procedures are used for which subject areas under the TEU and the EC treaty is provided at Europa - The Amsterdam Treaty: institutional matters.
Legislation is adopted in three different forms. Among them are (1) regulations, which are most like the statutes we are familiar with in the U.S. legal system. Regulations are binding on member states and are directly applicable within the individual national jurisdictions. Therefore, they directly create or affect the legal rights of citizens. (2) Directives are binding on some or all member states, but only concerning the end to be achieved. It is left to the affected national jurisdictions to develop implementing legislation within their own legal systems. (3) Decisions are binding in their entirety, but only upon those to whom they are specifically addressed. They are most commonly used to express the formal conclusions of inquiries into the breach of competition rules.
Final legislation is published in the Official Journal of the European Communities. Since 1968, the O.J. has been published in two series, Part L and Part C. Legislation is published in Part L, and is cited by year, issue number, and page number, e.g. 1975 O.J. (L 337) 7. Until 1974, the Official Journal was published only in French (hence occasional citations to the J.O.), but the EU published a special edition in English when the United Kingdom joined in 1974. This Special Edition is available in the Library (KJE908). The complete OJ is also available at the Library in microfiche. However, it runs about one year behind, and is not much used except for cite-checking.
The Official Journal is also available (1998 -) from the EU in PDF format. Pre-1998 legislation is also available through Europa, but only in HTML text. The Official Journal is also available through many commercial database vendors. For example, all EU legislation is available through Lexis/Nexis Academic, which you can link to from the Main Library's web site.
In fact, the best source for locating secondary legislation is Europa. One can search for documents by type, using various document registers, or by subject. One can also search for secondary legislation using the simple search interface of Eur-Lex, Europa's interface for retrieval of E.U. law. The Bibliographic Notice for each retrieved item will provide hyper-links to the full text of the norm (regulation, decision, or directive) in either PDF or HTML, as well as to all amendments, interpretive decisions of the Court of Justice, the underlying legal basis of the norm (treaty provision), and in some instances to OEIL (see below).
Most legislation begins with a formal Commission proposal to the Council. The proposal itself will usually be preceded by green papers (consultation documents) and white papers (policy documents), which outline policy rationales, summarize public input into the process, and generally serve the same function that Congressional documents serve in the U.S. legal system. These documents are published as Commission documents, or COM docs. Some green and white papers, as well as a register of COM docs completed since 2001, are available through Europa at Commission Documents web site. The Library also maintains a complete collection of COM docs in microfiche, organized by year and number, e.g. COM(96)606 (final). The most important Council documents are Common Positions, adopted as part of the co-decision procedure.
Europa provides the best means of searching for preparatory documents. One can use either OEIL or Pre-Lex to retrieve a complete file of preparatory documents for each enacted norm. The two databases largely overlap. However, OEIL documents the legislative process from the perspective of the European Parliament, while Pre-Lex focuses on the inter-agency relationship of the documentary trail created by the European Parliament, the Commission, the Council, and the Economic and Social Committee, in the course of legislation. In particular, it contains for each enacted norm in the database a graphic timeline indicating all major steps in the process of adopting the norm, together with links to documents produced at each step. The OEIL database contains information for legislation adopted from July, 1994 onward, and as noted above, there is a hyper-link to the relevant OEIL file from bibliographic records for individual regulations, directives, etc., retrieved in Eur-Lex. Pre-Lex contains information on legislation back to 1976, but there are no hyper-links from Eur-Lex; therefore, Pre-Lex must be searched directly.
Some older documents are available at the Library, either in print or microform. These include Debates of the European Parliament (1979-1998, KJE908 .A56), Reports of the European Parliament (1985-1997, microfiche), Working Documents (1978-1985, KJE908 .W67), and Texts Adopted by the European Parliament (1985 - , microfiche). Unless you are working on an historical topic, it is unlikely that you will have to consult these publications.
European secondary legislation is frequently amended. Therefore, the Commission prepares unofficial consolidations of frequently amended norms to assist researchers. However, the consolidation process has not been undertaken systematically, and a large number of important directives and regulations remain unconsolidated. To determine whether a particular provision has been consolidated, one should use the Directory of Community Legislation in Force. The Directory provides access to secondary legislation through an outline classification of subjects. In case a consolidated version is not available through the Directory, the researcher may yet find a consolidated version by searching the web site of the responsible Directorate General within the European Commission.
The implementation of EU directives in member states is monitored by the Commission at the Application of Community Law web site. It is also summarized in the bibliographic notices that are accessible through Eur-Lex. Lexis/Nexis Academic also includes information on national legislation implementing EU directives.
Europa accommodates research into current topics of legislative interest through Pre-Lex. The Bulletin of the European Union is a monthly periodical, published by the EU, which also tracks current developments. It is especially useful for the citations it provides to important documents in the legislative process. The Bulletin is available in HTML or PDF through Europa.
EU law is enforced by the European Court of Justice, the European Court of First Instance, and by courts of the member states. All of these sources produce published decisions. However, the decisions of the ECJ are most important as a source of doctrinal development.
Decisions of the ECJ and the Court of First Instance are officially reported in Reports of Cases Before the Court (KJE924.5 .C68). These reports are usually referred to in English language publications as European Court Reports, or ECR. Part I contains decisions of the ECJ, and Part II those of the Court of First Instance. However, these reports are somewhat cumbersome to use, and appear only after a time lag of several years. Several commercial publishers provide access to printed versions of the decisions of these courts much more quickly. The best known of these series is Common Market Law Reports, or CMLR (1962 - ), which is published in monthly pamphlets. The pamphlets are then replaced by annual bound volumes (usually four or five per year), which include Antitrust Reports as a separate segment. CMLR also includes decisions of national courts. The Library has CMLR (KJE923.7 .C66) as well as the ECR.
Decisions of the ECJ and Court of First Instance are also available through Curia, the official web site of the ECJ. The Curia Web site also offers a detailed summary of the contents of the case-law database on Curia. This database includes judgments and opinions of the Community Courts, as well as opinions of the Advocates General, since 1997, and provides a variety of access methods. Earlier decisions are available through Eur-Lex - Case Law, by number/date, or by keyword via the Eur-Lex simple search. Curia includes a link to annual surveys that summarize the application of ECJ decisions in national courts and legislatures, as well as a database of national court decisions. Decisions are also available in Lexis/Nexis Academic.
Over time, the ECJ has extended its jurisdiction to include the non-EC treaty-based enforcement of human rights against violations carried out by EU institutions within the context of commercial and economic integration. In doing so, it has increasingly looked to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights as a source of jurisprudential principles. This has been encouraged by the fact that all EU member states have also ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (sponsored by the Council of Europe, an organization quite separate from the EU) and accepted the jurisdiction of the ECHR. Therefore, the case law of the ECHR is of some importance in the evolution of EU law. The decisions of the ECHR are available at the Library. They are published officially in Reports of Judgments and Decisions (KJC5214 .A5 P82) and unofficially in European Human Rights Reports (KJC5132 .A52 E93). Judgments and decisions handed down since 1999 are available at the Court of Human Rights Web site.
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