Digitalisation of Legal Information -- A step forward towards a truly common European Legal Space

Europe is characterized by a multitude of complex, overlapping, hierarchical, and non-hierarchical legal systems or legal orders. All these systems of multi-level decision-making and governance are interlocked, mutually interdependent, and deeply embedded in a larger setting that can be identified as the European Legal Space. In the last few years the Publications Office of the European Union has played a prominent role in creating a digital and multilingual European Legal Space, as one of the main pillars for strengthening the European cohesion. This paper is a brief introduction to the challenges the European Legal Space is facing in terms of citizens' right to access legal information, and to the possible solutions enabling digital access to that information in terms of accessibility and understanding of its content with the help of future innovative technologies.