The CEPS EurLex dataset: 142.036 EU laws from 1952-2019 with full text and 22 variables

Creators:
Borret, Camille; Laurer Moritz
Publication Date:
2020
Dataset Description:

The dataset contains 142.036 EU laws – almost the entire corpus of the EU’s digitally available legal acts passed between 1952 – 2019. It encompasses the three types of legally binding acts passed by the EU institutions: 102.304 regulations, 4.070 directives, 35.798 decisions in English language. The dataset was scraped from the official EU legal database (Eur-lex.eu) and transformed in machine-readable CSV format with the programming languages R and Python. The dataset was collected by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) for the TRIGGER project (https://trigger-project.eu/). We hope that it will facilitate future quantitative and computational research on the EU.

Variables:
Name Description
Act_amends CELEX number of the old act amended by the new act (see detail on CELEX below)
Act_cites CELEX number of other acts cited by the act
Act_name Full name of act
act_raw_text The full raw text of the act in one string. Mostly includes: title, recitals, legal articles and annex. Please note that the texts of older laws is not always clean.
Additional_info Additional information
Amends_links link to previous act which is amended by the new act
Authors name of the act’s authors
CELEX unique CELEX identifier of the act.
Cites_links link to other acts, cited by the act
Date_document Date of the document. The eur-lex.eu website does not provide an explanation of which exact date in the legislative process this represents. The dataset ranges from 1952 to August 2019.
Date_publication Date the document was published
ELI_link European Legislation Identifier (ELI) link to the act.
EUROVOC A group of EuroVoc keywords associated with the act.
Eurlex_link Link to act on eur-lex.europa.eu website.
First_entry_into_force Date when act first entered into force
Legal_basis_celex The CELEX number of the act’s legal basis
Oeil_link Link to the European Parliament’s Legislative Observatory (Oeil). Provides procedural information.
Procedure_number Number of the legislative procedure leading to the act
Proposal_link Link to the Commission proposal proceeding the act
Status whether the act was in force at the time of scraping (August 2019). (“In Force” or “Not in Force”)
Subject_matter Group of keywords representing the subject matter of the act. Similar to EUROVOC, only less detailed, more abstract.
Temporal_status Date of end of validity of the act
Treaty Name of the Treaty the act is based on
Publisher:
Harvard Dataverse
Size:
1.5 GB
Formats:
CSV
License:
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal

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