Calling all authors who cite Court of Justice rulings: an important notice

Keen Europe-watchers and readers of the IPKat weblog (here and here) will by now have noticed that a new scheme has been introduced for the citation of legal decisions. It's called the European Case Law Identifier -- ECLI for short -- and its developers explain it thus:

The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) has been developed to facilitate the correct and unequivocal citation of judgments from European and national courts. A set of uniform metadata will help to improve search facilities for case law.

You can read all about it on the European E-Justice website here.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is already employing this citation system. Accordingly, JIPLP will be employing it too, for CJEU decisions.  Our policy is as follows:

• Articles and Current Intelligence notes submitted on or after 1 July 2014 will be expected to use ECLI citations for CJEU decisions;
• Articles and Current Intelligence notes submitted up to 30 June 2014 or already accepted for publication and in the course of production can be left as they are, though authors will be invited to consider amending their citations of CJEU decisions where (i) they are few in number and (ii) the making of the amendments will not delay publication.

As and when other courts and organisations use ECLI citations, we will notify authors accordingly.

I appreciate that this will cause a good deal of inconvenience and annoyance to a large number of contributors, but the introduction of ECLI citations is a good and overdue idea and will make it far easier for the JIPLP editorial staff to handle the many different ways in which authors currently choose to cite CJEU cases. Within a few months of their appearance in the journal, readers too will come to appreciate their advantages.