Reading a court judgment instead of the press release
Coverage of a European court ruling usually arrives as a sentence about who won, and that sentence is frequently wrong in a specific way: the court answered a narrower question than the one in the headline. The judgments are published in full, free, in every official language, and they are organised predictably enough that a non-lawyer can find out what was actually decided.
Four conventions do most of the work, and none of them require training.
The case number tells you which court and which route. A number prefixed with C belongs to the Court of Justice; a T prefix belongs to the General Court, which hears actions against European institutions at first instance. The year in the number is the year of registration, not of judgment, which is why a case number that looks old is normal — these proceedings take years.
Most of the interesting cases are preliminary rulings. Under Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, a national court hearing a case that turns on European law may refer questions to the Court of Justice. The Court answers the questions. It does not decide the national case, which returns to the referring court to be decided in light of the answers. This is the single most misreported feature of European case law: a ruling described as deciding a dispute has usually done something more limited and more consequential, namely fixed the interpretation that all national courts must now apply.
The operative part is at the end. Judgments conclude with a numbered section, following the words «hereby rules», that states the answers. That section is the law. Everything before it is reasoning, and the reasoning matters enormously for future cases, but if you read one part of a judgment, read that one. It is usually a few paragraphs, and it is written to be quoted.
The Advocate General's opinion is not the judgment. An Advocate General publishes a reasoned opinion ahead of the Court, often months earlier. It is independent, frequently more readable than the judgment, and sometimes not followed. Opinions are routinely reported as outcomes, and when the Court then departs from one, the second round of coverage reads as a reversal of something that never happened.
The structure, in order
A judgment opens with the parties and the subject, sets out the legal framework by quoting the provisions at issue, recounts the dispute in the main proceedings and the questions referred, then takes each question in turn before the operative part. The legal framework section is a gift to non-specialists: it assembles, in one place, the texts the Court considered relevant, which is a better starting point than a search engine.
Finding and citing
Every document has an ECLI, a European case law identifier, which is stable and the right thing to cite. The Court's own database carries the full text, the opinion, the referring court's questions and the procedural history. Press releases exist and are written by the institution's own service: useful for orientation, not a substitute, and explicitly labelled as such.
What a ruling changes
Less immediately than coverage implies, and more eventually. An interpretation given by the Court binds national courts, and the practical consequences arrive through subsequent national judgments, administrative practice and, where the ruling exposes a gap, new legislation. The gap between a ruling and its effects is where most of the real policy work happens, and it is poorly covered because it is slow and has no single moment to report.
Which is a reason to read the operative part yourself. It is the part that will still be being argued about in five years, and it takes about as long to read as the press release.