Researching the Law of Austria

At a glance

Legal system family

Civil law. Private law is codified in the Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, promulgated as JGS Nr. 946/1811, whose opening section has been in force in the same wording since 1 January 1812.⁴

Official gazette

Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich, issued by the Federal Chancellor within the Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes and held for retrieval at www.ris.bka.gv.at.¹

Constitution in force

Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz, cited from BGBl. Nr. 1/1930 as a Wiederverlautbarung and taken by RIS as having commenced in all its provisions on 19 December 1945.²

Language of the authoritative text

German. Article 8 of the Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz makes German the state language of the Republic, without prejudice to rights granted to linguistic minorities by federal statute.³

Austrian law names the address at which Austrian law is published. Section 7 of the Bundesgesetzblattgesetz requires the instruments to be promulgated in the Bundesgesetzblatt to be held available for retrieval on the internet at www.ris.bka.gv.at, and requires every number of the gazette to point at that address.

A statutory web address is an unusual thing to find in a statute book. The Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes is not a site about the gazette. Since 1 January 2004 it is the gazette.

Section 1 of the same act has the Federal Chancellor issue a Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich, in German, within RIS. Section 9 requires the promulgations to be accessible at any time, free of charge, and without proof of identity. Section 8 sets the conditions that make an electronic promulgation worth trusting: a format guaranteeing upward compatibility, production by a reliable process, an electronic signature, and no alteration after signing or deletion once released for retrieval. Read together, those three sections describe a gazette that is free, permanent and tamper evident, and that exists nowhere but on one server.

Then section 8 does something that reads like a provision from another century and is not. Every document must be backed up at least three times and printed at least four times in certified form. One backup copy and one certified printout go to the Austrian State Archive, a second pair to the Austrian National Library, a third printout to the parliamentary library. The electronic gazette has a paper insurance policy written into the statute that created it, deposited in three institutions, and anyone who has to prove what an Austrian instrument said on the day it was promulgated has somewhere to go that is not a server.

The same statute draws the line that matters most to anyone actually using RIS. Section 13 permits data serving only to inform about the law of the Republic to be held at the same address, and then says of those non-authentic data that no liability is accepted for their accuracy or completeness. Bundesrecht konsolidiert, the consolidated federal law that most people mean when they say RIS, is that second category. It sits on the same host, under the same masthead, one click from the authentic gazette, and the statute calls it information.

The difference is visible in the text itself. RIS expands the abbreviations in a consolidated provision for accessibility, so article 8 of the constitution opens on screen with the parenthesised numeral and then the words Absatz eins before the sentence begins. Anyone copying a provision out of that view into a brief is copying a reading aid, not a text. The wording that was promulgated is in the signed document of the number that promulgated it.

The Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz is cited from BGBl. Nr. 1/1930, with the marker WV against it. The Bundesgesetzblattgesetz shows why a founding citation of that shape can mislead: among the things published in BGBl I are the joint announcements by the Chancellor and the responsible ministers republishing a federal statute, the Wiederverlautbarung of article 49a of the constitution, so a founding citation may be pointing at a republication rather than at an enactment.

RIS then adds the part the citation hides outright. On the prevailing view and the settled case law of the Constitutional Court, the B-VG became fully effective again on 19 December 1945, and RIS takes that date, for documentary purposes, as the commencement of all its provisions. The list of amending instruments underneath runs from 1931 to BGBl. I Nr. 41/2026. The same front matter points at the First Federal Constitutional Law Clean-Up Act, BGBl. I Nr. 2/2008, which is where to look for what was taken out of the constitutional order rather than added to it.

Article 8 of the B-VG makes German the state language of the Republic, without prejudice to the rights granted to linguistic minorities by federal statute, and section 1 of the Bundesgesetzblattgesetz makes the gazette German too, so the two ends of the question meet without needing a third source. The article has two further paragraphs worth knowing: the Republic commits itself to the languages and cultures of the autochthonous ethnic groups, and Austrian Sign Language is recognised as a language in its own right.

Private law rests on the Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, promulgated as JGS Nr. 946/1811. Its opening section defines civil law as the body of laws determining the private rights and duties of the inhabitants of the state among themselves, and the RIS version history for that section shows a single version, in force since 1 January 1812. Note what the record calls the thing that promulgated it: not the Bundesgesetzblatt, but JGS, an abbreviation for a gazette that stopped existing long before the Republic did.

Those older gazettes are not on RIS. The Austrian National Library runs ALEX, a collection of digitised historical legal and legislative texts which its own search page describes as close to five million pages across about two hundred titles, and that is where the imperial and interwar runs sit, along with the Land gazettes before their modern series and the parliamentary papers. The National Library therefore stands at both ends of the arrangement: it archives the certified printout of every number promulgated today, and it serves the scans of the issues nobody promulgates any more.

One provision is easy to read past. Section 7 also provides that if the instruments cannot be made available online, other than temporarily, promulgation has to happen in some other way satisfying article 49 of the constitution. The statute contemplates the failure of its own website, which is a sensible thing for a statute to do and a sensible thing to remember on the day a RIS link does not resolve.

Primary sources online

• Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (opens an external site)The Federal Chancellery's legal information system. The authentic gazette and the consolidations sit on one host, under one masthead.
• Bundesgesetzblattgesetz on RIS (opens an external site)The statute that put the gazette inside RIS. Section 8 on signing and deposit, section 13 on what the consolidated data are not.
• Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz, consolidated (opens an external site)The constitution as RIS consolidates it, with the 1930 citation, the commencement note and the full list of amending instruments.
• Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, consolidated (opens an external site)The civil code of 1811 section by section, each with its own version history and the dates between which each wording applied.
• ALEX, Historische Rechts- und Gesetzestexte (opens an external site)The National Library's digitised historical gazettes and parliamentary papers, which is where Austrian citations older than RIS lead.
• Verfassungsgerichtshof (opens an external site)The Constitutional Court, whose settled case law is what RIS leans on for the date the constitution took effect again. It answered here only on a second attempt.

Reviewed 2026-08-30. 5 sources cited on this page.