Foreign Law Guide

FOREIGN LAW GUIDE

Researching the Law of Germany

At a glance

Legal system family
Civil law, codified. Article 74 of the Basic Law lists civil law, criminal law, court organisation and judicial procedure among the fields of concurrent legislation. 6
Official gazette
Bundesgesetzblatt. Issued on the Verkündungsplattform des Bundes as a PDF carrying a qualified electronic seal, free to download, for everything published from 1 January 2023. 1
Constitution in force
Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland of 23 May 1949, BGBl. page 1, last amended by article 1 of the act of 22 March 2025 amending articles 109, 115 and 143h, BGBl. I Nr. 94. 6
Language of the authoritative text
German, on the publisher's own account of its practice rather than on any provision cited here. The promulgation platform states that its site is otherwise available only in German and that the English translations offered elsewhere are not the official versions. 4

A German statute cited as BGBl. I Nr. 94 and a German statute cited as BGBl. I S. 1146 are not two house styles for the same reference. They come from two different gazettes. On 1 January 2023 the Bundesgesetzblatt moved to the Verkündungsplattform des Bundes at recht.bund.de, and the move changed the unit of publication as well as the medium. The gazette now works by single promulgation: one number carries one statute, one instrument or one notice, so a citation names a number and not a page. There is no editorially produced table of contents any more, the platform says, because there is nothing left to tabulate.

Each number is issued as a PDF under a qualified electronic seal, and everything from 1 January 2023 is free to download. The platform gives the seal a page of its own, and two sentences there are worth having: a later change of a single letter or character would show up at once and would invalidate the seal, and the seal can be checked with the common PDF programs. The authenticity of a German instrument is therefore something a reader can test, which it was not while authenticity was a property of a printed volume in a library.

Before that date the arrangement was the reverse of today's, and this is the single fact most likely to mislead someone working across the boundary. Until 31 December 2022 the legally binding version of a statute or instrument was the official paper edition. The electronic Bundesgesetzblatt at bgbl.de, run by the Bundesanzeiger Verlag and still where issues from 1949 to 2022 are consulted, carried what the platform now calls electronic copies rather than the binding official version. The phrase the electronic Bundesgesetzblatt means the authentic text after 2022 and a convenience copy before it.

Two older routes are easy to miss and expensive to miss. Until the end of 2022 federal statutory instruments could also be promulgated in the official part of the Bundesanzeiger, and instruments of the federal waterways and shipping administration in the Verkehrsblatt. Somebody who concludes that a pre-2023 German regulation does not exist because it is not in the Bundesgesetzblatt has looked in one of three places.

The constitutional hook is article 82 of the Basic Law, which has statutes signed by the Federal President and promulgated in the Bundesgesetzblatt, and then adds in a single sentence that the Bundesgesetzblatt may be kept in electronic form. Article 82 also supplies a default worth knowing by heart: where an instrument names no commencement date, it takes effect on the fourteenth day after the day on which the issue was put out. On a gazette of single promulgations that day is a property of the number, so the number is not merely a locator.

The Bundestag prints the Basic Law under a citation line that is itself a specimen of the change: the Grundgesetz of 23 May 1949, BGBl. page 1, last amended by article 1 of the act of 22 March 2025 amending articles 109, 115 and 143h, BGBl. I Nr. 94. The 1949 citation carries a page number and the 2025 one carries none. Reconciling the two is reconciling two numbering systems, not correcting somebody's typing.

None of this yields a consolidated text. The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Federal Office of Justice provide virtually the whole body of current federal law free of charge at gesetze-im-internet.de, with English translations of a selection. The promulgation platform's English page is direct about the standing of both: the consolidated texts and the translations are not the official versions, and those can be found only on the platform. It also names the reason a consolidation service is needed at all, the article law, which changes numerous provisions of several core statutes at once and is not intelligible read on its own.

The same page adds a sentence for anyone planning to work in translation: the site is otherwise available only in German. Those two sentences are the whole basis of the language line in the fact block above, and that is worth saying. Spain has a decree naming the language its statutes are published in, Austria a section naming the language its gazette is issued in. Germany, in what this guide could load, has a publisher describing its own practice, and no German provision on the point is cited here.

A caution from preparing this page belongs beside that. gesetze-im-internet.de did not resolve at all from the machine this research was done on, over repeated attempts by two clients, while every other German host named here answered normally. The address resolves through a juris domain, so the failure was in name resolution and not in anything the site returned. Nothing here is traced to it.

Federal law is only a part of German law, and the Basic Law says so three times over. Article 70 leaves legislative power with the Länder except where the Basic Law confers it on the Federation. Article 74 puts civil law, criminal law, court organisation and judicial procedure on the concurrent list, which is why the codes are federal. Article 31 settles the collision in four words: federal law breaks Land law.

For research that is a directory problem rather than a doctrinal one. The justice portal run for the Federation and the Länder lists one entry for the Federation and one for each of the sixteen Länder, and those seventeen entries point at seventeen different hosts on seventeen different registrable domains. No two share a service. Several are juris installations under a jportal path, and Lower Saxony's is a commercial publisher's site. The portal adds, without elaborating, that some of them charge.

So the answer to where German law is published turns on three things at once: whether the instrument is federal or comes from a Land, whether it was promulgated before or after 2023, and whether what is wanted is the text as promulgated or a text as amended. Only the first of those is a question about German federalism. The other two are questions about the last four years.

What each record below is being relied on for, and where the line falls between a binding German text and a convenience copy, is set out in Germany: Sources and Notes .

Primary sources online

SOURCES

  1. Unsere Leistungen, services of the Verkündungsplattform des Bundes. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. https://www.recht.bund.de/de/informationen/leistungen/leistungen_node.html. Accessed 2026-08-30. The platform's own account of what it publishes. The Bundesgesetzblatt is the Federation's organ of promulgation for statutes and statutory instruments; each issue is put out as a PDF carrying a qualified electronic seal for integrity and authenticity; everything from 1 January 2023 is free to download. The page also describes the annual Fundstellennachweise A and B, which have appeared since 1952 and were divided into the two parts in 1968.
  2. Archiv vor 2023, Bundesgesetzblatt issues before the electronic platform. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. https://www.recht.bund.de/de/archiv/archiv_node.html. Accessed 2026-08-30. The page that draws the line at 31 December 2022. Until that date the legally binding version was the official paper edition, with a parallel electronic publication at www.bgbl.de operated by the Bundesanzeiger Verlag, where issues from 1949 to 2022 can still be consulted. It also records two routes that a researcher looking only in the Bundesgesetzblatt would miss: until the end of 2022 federal statutory instruments could be promulgated in the official part of the Bundesanzeiger, and instruments of the federal waterways and shipping administration in the Verkehrsblatt.
  3. FAQ of the Verkündungsplattform des Bundes. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. https://www.recht.bund.de/de/informationen/faq/faq_node.html. Accessed 2026-08-30. Two answers here change how a German citation is read. The first says the Bundesgesetzblatt previously available at www.bgbl.de consisted of electronic copies and not the binding official version. The second explains that there is no editorially produced table of contents any more, because the gazette moved to single-instrument promulgation: one number now carries one statute, one instrument or one notice.
  4. Promulgation Platform of the Federal Law Gazette, English description. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. https://www.recht.bund.de/en/home/home_node.html. Accessed 2026-08-30. The English page states plainly what the German pages leave implicit, and it is the whole basis of this page's language field, which rests on the publisher describing its own practice rather than on any provision about the language of the authoritative text. The site is otherwise available only in German; the consolidated texts and the English translations offered at gesetze-im-internet.de, which the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Federal Office of Justice provide jointly, are not the official versions, and the official versions can be found only on the promulgation platform. It also names the article law, the omnibus amending act that changes provisions of many separate statutes at once, as the reason a consolidated service is needed at all.
  5. Siegelprüfung, the seal on each number of the Bundesgesetzblatt and how it is checked. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. https://www.recht.bund.de/de/informationen/signatur/signatur_node.html. Accessed 2026-08-30. A qualified electronic seal is technically the same thing as a qualified electronic signature, the page explains, and differs only in being issued to a legal person rather than to a natural one. A later change of a single letter or character would show up at once and would make the seal invalid, and the page says the seal can be checked with the common PDF programs rather than with anything special.
  6. Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, text served by the Bundestag. Deutscher Bundestag. https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/aufgaben/rechtsgrundlagen/grundgesetz. Accessed 2026-08-30. Trimmed extract of a page of 446,752 bytes. The citation line the Bundestag prints above the text dates the Basic Law to 23 May 1949, BGBl. page 1, and gives its most recent amendment as article 1 of the act amending articles 109, 115 and 143h of 22 March 2025, cited as BGBl. I Nr. 94 with no page number. Article 82 has statutes promulgated in the Bundesgesetzblatt and permits the gazette to be kept in electronic form; where an instrument names no commencement date it takes effect on the fourteenth day after the day the issue was put out. Article 70 leaves legislative power with the Länder except where the Basic Law confers it on the Federation, article 74 puts civil law, criminal law and court organisation on the concurrent legislative list, and article 31 states that federal law breaks Land law.
  7. Bundes- und Landesrecht, the justice portal index of federal and Land legislation services. Ministerium der Justiz des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen for the Justizportal des Bundes und der Länder. https://www.justiz.de/onlinedienste/bundesundlandesrecht/index.php. Accessed 2026-08-30. The single index of where German legislation is served, one entry for the Federation and one for each of the sixteen Länder, and a sentence saying that some of the services charge. The seventeen entries link seventeen different hosts on seventeen different registrable domains, so no two of them share a domain. Several are juris installations under a jportal path, and Lower Saxony's is a commercial publisher's site at voris.wolterskluwer-online.de.

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