Search

From 1 July 2013 the EU Official Journal is published in electronic form through the EUR-Lex platform. Therefore, this platform is comprehensive source of authentic and non-authentic information regarding EU law. Despite this progress, that is however still not present in the Czech Republic, the EUR-Lex is facing occasional criticism because of the lack of userfriendliness and clarity. Isolated directive or other document can not be considered a legal information, but merely the legal datum. Given the specificity of the decisions of the Court of Justice of the EU, we are able to achieve communication of the resulting legal information only after linking the decision with the text of the respective directive. Therefore, access to these related documents should be extremely simple and should allow for easy orientation of the user. Currently, EUR-Lex does not provide this comfort as the case law related to its directive or regulation is displayed only by so-called celex number. In this paper we discuss the structure of celex number and the possibility to use existing XML structure maintained by EUR-Lex for automatization of some search functions. Our paper is based on the following premises:Relevant legal information includes the opinion of the advocate general, which is currently impossible to locate easily (these opinions are not present in the list of related documents). Relevant legal information is the information about existence of unresolved preliminary questions brought before the CJEU; however, this information can not be easily ascertained given the current form of displaying of the related documents. Based on existing metadata structure in which EUR-Lex operates (especially celex numbers as unique identifiers of individual documents), it is possible to automate some research operations and to fix the above mentioned shortcomings of the current search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]