Library & Cultural Services: Law: EU Legislation

Key Resources for EU Legislation

EUR-Lex
The EUR-Lex is the official EU portal for EU law and provides complete collections of EU legal texts. This search engine allows searching for specific documents by citation (natural number) or category e.g. legislation, case-law or a general search by terms or EUROVOC keywords (EUROVOC is a EU thesaurus which provides controlled keywords for different topics).
The Official Journal of The European Communities (OJ)
All secondary legislation is published in the 'L (Legislation) Series' of the Official Journal (often referred to as OJ L). The L series is published daily and divided into two sections. The first contains acts whose publication is obligatory, eg Regulations; the second section contains acts whose publication is not obligatory, eg Directives, Decisions, etc. The official journal is also available in pdf format from 1998 onwards on Eurlex.
Summaries of EU Legislation
The 'Summaries of EU legislation' website presents the main aspects of European Union (EU) legislation in a concise & easy-to-read manner. It forms part of the Europa portal, which is published by the EU institutions.

Westlaw
Full text of legislative acts of the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, and the European Commission reported in the Official Journal of the European Community, L Series, including international agreements; secondary legislation such as regulations and European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) general decisions, directives, and recommendations; and supplementary legislation (legislation resulting from agreements between member states). Coverage begins with 1952.
Westlaw International
Lexis Plus
The EU Legislation file on LNB covers Decisions, Directives and Regulations of the European Union. Also included, under the heading 'Other', are Notices, Communications, Guidelines, Recommendations, Common Positions, comfort letters from the Commission, and Information. Within the 'Consolidated Law' folder are weekly updated PDFs of the Official Journal entries for all EU legislation searchable by Celex number.
Alternative Institutional login. Only UK Materials available via this route.

Types of EU Legislation

Legislation can be divided into two main types:

Primary Legislation - The various treaties establishing and amending these treaties.

Secondary legislation - Also called subordinate or delegated legislation. The main instruments of secondary legislation are regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions and are all published in the Official Journal of the European Communities (OJ).

EU Implementation in Domestic Law

N-Lex
A common gateway to national implementing measures which aims to help facilitate access to information on how directives have been transposed by 27 of the member states.