Setting up a case law database
On 26 February, the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg hosted an international workshop about the management of judicial databases, with the downstream objective of creating a database on cross-border enforcement cases.
The workshop “Setting up a case law database” marked the launch of the IC2BE (Informed Choices in Cross-Border Enforcement) transnational research project. Funded by the Justice Programme (2014-2020) of the European Commission, the project aims to assess the working in practice of the “second generation” of EU regulations on procedural law for cross-border cases. For that purpose, the European Commission also entrusted the consortium of researchers with establishing a database of judgments rendered at national and European level.
With that purpose in mind, the Max Planck Institute held the first workshop of the IC2BE project on its premises. Representatives from different universities and institutions presented a variety of existing databases that provide public access to judgements from national and European courts. While experts from the European Commission, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union illustrated collections of judgements from European courts – (HUDOC, JURE, CURIA, ECLI search engine), others focused on national databases (juris.de, Cendoj) and cited as examples databases that resulted from research projects (Lynxlex, EUPILLAR, EUFam’s, e-CODEX).
Given that the future database is meant to facilitate the dissemination of judicial documentation for legal professionals across Europe, judges and practitioners also joined the discussions and were invited to express their needs and desires.
