The European Court of Justice (created in 1952) interprets EU law to make sure it is applied in the same way in all EU countries. It also settles legal disputes between member state governments and EU institutions. Individuals, companies or organisations can also bring cases before the Court if they feel their rights have been infringed by an EU institution.
The Court of Justice is composed of one judge per member state, and is assisted by advocates-general, whose job is to present impartial opinions on the cases brought before the Court.
There is also a General Court (created in 1988) that deals with cases brought forward by private individuals, companies and some organisations, and cases relating to competition law.
Combined, the Court of Justice and General Court have delivered some 15,000 decisions.
For more information on EU judicial institutions and their jurisdiction, see the Europa page of basic information on the European Court of Justice.
It is possible to search for EU case law by case number, case name, and various other methods of access, including by systematic subject classification and boolean full-text searching, at the Europa Case Law page.
Curia is the web site of the European Court of Justice and the General Court. It provides access to all decisions reported in European Court Reports since 1954. The Curia database provides access to case law in a variety of ways.
The Search Form supports full text searches, as well as searches of a large number of fields, enabling precise case-law retrieval. Field search options include, e.g., the stage of cases (closed and/or pending cases), the Court involved, the type of document (such as judgments, orders, Opinions, Opinions of the Court and summaries), the case number, the names of parties, a period or date, the subject-matter, the procedure and the result, the legal acts of the European Union cited in the case-law, systematic subject classification, the country of origin of references for preliminary rulings, and the nationality of parties.
There are also a useful Digest of Case Law and Alphabetical Table of Subject Matter, but both these indexes are available in French only.
Finally, the Annotatiion of Judgments is not an index of cases themselves, but essentially a bibliogrpahy of commentary on cases listed by case number.
European Court of Justice decisions from 1954 and Court of First Instance decisions from 1989 are available online in Lexis.com (Eur-Lex European Union Cases). This file includes judgments of the Court and the opinions delivered by the Advocate-General.
To find a case for which you know name of the parties and/or the number, do a segment search, e.g. NAME(Commission w/5 Poland and c-504/09). Note that case numbers are included in the Name segment.
The European Union Cases file in WestlawNext contains the full-text decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Communities and the Court of First Instance of the European Communities, as well as the text of advocate-general opinions, court orders, and judgments, as reported by the Office for Official Publications for the European Communities and included in European Court Reports.
To find a case for you know the name of the parties and/or the number do a field search of the parties and/or document number fields, e.g. Parties(Poland) and/or Document Number(c-504/09).
Decisions of the European Court of Justice are officially published in Reports of Cases Before the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance (Reports of Cases Before the Court, until 1989) (ALF KJE924.5 .R47). This series is generally referred to as European Court Reports. It contains judgments, interim orders, submissions (opinions) of Advocates-General, etc. The cases are published in chronological order with yearly indexes. This series is no longer used for research, given the ready electronic availability of ECJ decisions in Lexis.com, WestlawNext, and the Court's own web site.
Decisions of the European Court of Justice are digested in European Current Law: Monthly Digest (KJC30 .E95). It contains selected summaries and citations to decisions of national, regional, and international courts, and is cumulated in European Current Law Yearbook (KJC30 .E97).