European Case Law Identifier: Indispensable Asset for Legal Information Retrieval

In December 2010 the EU Council of Ministers decided on the ‘Conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law’ (hereafter: ‘ECLI-conclusions’). In this paper we will discuss the coming about and the contents of these conclusions, in the broader perspective of access to case law.