Germany: Sources and Notes

Seven records stand behind the Germany guide. This page says what each is doing there, which is not the same question as what each one says, and it is the question a reader checking a footnote actually has.

Five of the seven come from the promulgation platform alone, one from the Bundestag, and the last from the justice portal, which is an index rather than a text.

The guide built on these seven records, covering the gazette, the seal and the law of the Länder, is Researching the Law of Germany.

The boundary four

Four of the records exist to support a single distinction, and a reader who wants to test the guide's account of it should read them in this order. The services page and the seal page describe the arrangement from 1 January 2023, where a number of the gazette is a sealed file and the seal is the thing a reader can verify. The archive page describes what came before, when the binding version was the official paper edition. The frequently asked questions page carries the sentence that says what the older electronic run actually is.

Taken together they answer a question that a single record could not: what changed, on what date, and what the older material is now good for.

Convenience copies and translations

The English page of the promulgation platform is the record behind the language line in the guide's fact block, and it is worth saying plainly why a publisher's description of its own website is doing that work. No German provision about the language of the authoritative text is cited on this site. What the platform states is that the consolidated texts and translations found elsewhere are not official, and that its own site is otherwise German only.

Those two sentences are evidence about practice rather than about law, and the fact block is written to exactly that limit. Compare the Spanish and Austrian pages, where a named provision settles the same question, and the difference in what a fact block can honestly claim becomes visible.

One extract, and the reason for it

The Bundestag page carrying the Basic Law is 446,752 bytes, far past the size at which a full response is stored here, so what is held is a trimmed extract carrying the cited passages with their surroundings. The provenance file records the full response's length and hash, so the original stays fetchable and comparable. Five passages are quoted from it, among them the citation line above the text and the provisions on promulgation, residual legislative power and the concurrent list.

The host with no record at all

gesetze-im-internet.de appears in the guide, is linked from it, and has no record in the list below. The absence is deliberate. The domain did not resolve from the machine this research ran on, under two separate clients, though every other German host used here answered. A note describing a fetch that throws cannot be re-checked the way the other entries are, so nothing was filed, and nothing is traced to it.

The index

The last record is a directory rather than a legal text: the justice portal page that indexes the services carrying federal and Land legislation. It is cited for a structural point that no single Land service could make on its own, namely that the entries lead to as many different hosts as there are entries, and that the portal itself notes that some of them charge.

Reviewed 2026-08-30. 7 sources cited on this page.