Standards
European Case Law Identifier (ECLI)
A common identifier format for European judicial decisions.
- Kind
- Identifiers
- Steward
- European Union and participating national judicial authorities
What it describes
ECLI provides a common way to identify judicial decisions from European and participating national courts. Its structured components name the jurisdiction, court, year, and a court-assigned ordinal. This can make a decision easier to cite across databases that use different local case numbers or language variants. The assigning authority and the actual decision remain the source of legal meaning.
ECLI coverage depends on adoption by participating courts and databases. A decision may have local identifiers as well, and an ECLI does not tell a reader whether the ruling is final, precedential, or still good law. Preserve the court, decision date, case context, and source text. Cross-database matching should confirm that two citations lead to the same decision, not just similar titles.
Structure
Five colon-separated components beginning ECLI, followed by country, court, year, and ordinal identifier.
Useful for
- Match decisions across legal databases.
- Create stable court-decision citations.
- Separate local case numbers from common identifiers.
Limits
- Coverage varies by court.
- Does not state precedential status.
- Does not replace reading the judgment.
How it is used in practice
Case law is cited differently in every legal system: by court and docket number, by report series and page, by party names and year. ECLI gives a decision a single shape of identifier whatever the national citation style, with fields for the country or European body, the court, the year and an ordinal that the court or its publisher assigns. Council conclusions in 2011 invited the member states to introduce ECLI and a minimum set of metadata for decisions, and adoption has been voluntary and uneven. The European e-Justice portal explains the scheme and points to national search tools.
For a researcher the benefit is a stable key to join a decision across databases, language versions and citing documents. The identifier does not carry the text. The text lives in the court's or publisher's database, which may be official, partial or commercial.
A worked example
A fictional compliance memo cites a decision by a fictional court, the Court of Halden, with an ECLI. A reviewer wants to confirm that the decision exists, was delivered on the stated date and says what the memo claims.
The reviewer resolves the ECLI through the court's own database and, because the database also offers a translation, notes which language version was read. The record keeps the ECLI, the court, the decision date as shown in the source, the retrieval date and the paragraph cited. A subsequent appeal is a separate decision with its own ECLI, and the memo's statement that the ruling stands is only as good as the check made for later decisions. The reviewer records that no appeal was found in the databases searched on that date, as a bounded negative finding.
Evaluating a claim that rests on an ECLI
Check the issuer. Because assignment is the responsibility of each participating court or national body, an ECLI is most reliable when it comes from that body's own database. An ECLI that appears only in a secondary source should be verified at the court, since typing errors in the court code or ordinal are easy and the result may point to a different decision.
Read the decision, not the metadata. The identifier and its minimal metadata say that a decision exists and where to find it. The legal meaning depends on the text, the court's rank, the jurisdiction, and later history. Whether the decision is final, binding, overturned or distinguished are claims needing their own sources, such as subsequent decisions and official reports.
Confusions to avoid
ECLI is not a case number. A court's docket number identifies a proceeding within that court. The ECLI identifies the decision and is designed to be unique across participating courts. Several decisions can arise from one proceeding, and each has its own ECLI.
It is also not proof of precedential status or of coverage. A decision without an ECLI may exist in a database that does not use it, and the absence of an ECLI says nothing about the decision. Conversely, the presence of one says nothing about its importance. Finally, do not parse meaning beyond the specified components: the ordinal format is set by the issuing body, and attempts to infer chronological order or volume from it will fail for some courts.
Questions a reviewer can ask
Was the ECLI taken from the court's own database or from a secondary source? Does the decision found there match the court, date and subject in the citation? Which language version was read? Does the claim depend on the decision being final, and what was searched to see if it was appealed or overruled? Is the paragraph cited retained with its context? When was the database read?
Related terms
Found an error on this page? See corrections for what counts as one, how to report it and the dated log.
Enquiry
Which of your sources carry European Case Law Identifier (ECLI)?
Tell us which sources carry it, which key the same entity some other way and who may read which. We reply with whether and how a first record would use this identifier.
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