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European Union Case Law is Libra’s EUR-Lex source. The name undersells it: case law is what most people come for, but the same source reaches the whole of EUR-Lex, the EU’s official legal database, including legislation, consolidated texts and the treaties. Libra searches EUR-Lex directly and pulls full document text from the Publications Office repository that serves it. Official, free, authoritative.
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Write your prompt in any language, but think in topics rather than citations. Libra distils your question into a handful of English keywords and matches them against document titles and text, so data protection consent finds the case law where Article 6 GDPR 2016/679 finds nothing.

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What it covers

By default Libra searches all of EUR-Lex without restriction, and narrows to a single collection only when your question clearly calls for one. Case law is the collection most matters need: Alongside case law, the same source reaches EU legislation (regulations, directives and decisions in force), consolidated versions of amended acts, the treaties, international agreements with third countries, preparatory acts from the legislative pipeline, parliamentary questions, and EUR-Lex’s EEA and EFTA material. It also reaches past the EU institutions: EUR-Lex indexes national transposition measures, the Member State laws notified as implementing a directive, along with national case law applying EU law and the JURE collection on jurisdiction and the enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters. Coverage of the Court’s own case law runs back to its first judgments in the 1950s. Nearly every EUR-Lex document carries a CELEX number (sector 6 is case law), and that is the identifier Libra works with: search results come back as titles plus CELEX numbers, and each citation in the answer is labelled with the CELEX number of the document behind it, or with the document’s title where EUR-Lex returns no CELEX. Libra does not search or cite by ECLI.

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Languages

EUR-Lex publishes in all 24 official EU languages, and Libra reaches all of them, though not quite in the way you would expect. Your search terms always go to EUR-Lex in English, whatever language you wrote your prompt in: the EUR-Lex search engine is queried in English, and Libra translates your terms on the way in. What your own language controls is which documents come back, because Libra restricts the results to documents that exist in the language you are working in. Retrieval then falls back rather than failing. If a document turns out to have no usable text in the language you are working in, Libra fetches the English version instead of returning nothing; and where there is no usable HTML at all, it falls back to the PDF.

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Practice areas covered well

EU competition and State aid, internal market and the four freedoms, GDPR and data protection, consumer protection, VAT and customs, IP (trade marks, SPCs), public procurement, asylum and migration, sanctions.

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Landmark judgments worth knowing

  • Van Gend en Loos: direct effect of EU law.
  • Costa v ENEL: primacy of EU law.
  • Cassis de Dijon: mutual recognition.
  • Francovich: Member State liability.
  • Schrems I and II: international data transfers.
  • Achmea: intra-EU bilateral investment treaties.
  • Google Spain: right to be forgotten.

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What you can ask

  • “Has the CJEU ruled on whether a national licensing requirement is compatible with the freedom to provide services?”
  • “What is the CJEU’s line on the standing of competitors in State aid actions?”
  • “Summarise where the case law on international transfers of personal data stands after Schrems II.”
  • “Which Member State measures were notified as transposing the Whistleblower Protection Directive?”
  • “Give me the consolidated text of the GDPR alongside the case law on the legitimate-interest ground.”

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Setup

None. European Union Case Law is Included with every Libra subscription, so there is nothing to connect in Settings → Integrations. Click Research in the composer, tick European Union under Jurisdictions, and switch on European Union Case Law — it sits in that jurisdiction alongside the Unified Patent Court. Like every research source other than Web Search, it is off until you switch it on.

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Tips

EUR-Lex matches keywords against document titles and text. Article numbers, directive and CELEX codes, dates and quoted phrases are not matched and will return nothing, so late payment commercial transactions is a far better prompt than Directive 2011/7/EU Article 3. If a search comes back empty, drop the most specific term and ask again.
Say “legislation only”, “the consolidated text” or “case law only” and Libra narrows the search to that part of EUR-Lex instead of the whole database. Worth doing whenever a topic has both a governing regulation and a long line of judgments and you only want one of them.
A EUR-Lex search carries no date restriction and returns up to twenty documents ranked by relevance, not recency. Say in your prompt which period you care about, then check the dates on what comes back before you rely on it being current.
EUR-Lex alone tells you the EU-law angle. Add a national source, Germany, Italy, Belgium and so on, for how the domestic court has applied the CJEU line.
The Court of Justice and the General Court have different roles. Say which one you mean when it matters.

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Next steps

Unified Patent Court

The UPC’s case law, relevant for any patent matter.

Research mode

Use European Union Case Law in any chat.