Legal Library: Looking up statutes & judgments
Search laws and published judgments and verify every citation at the official source.
The Legal Library is our searchable collection of German laws (by section, official text) and published court decisions. If the AI mentions a citation and it is in our database, you can open it with one click and read it yourself — at no additional cost.
What you can do
- Search for a keyword (e.g., "damages"), a section ("§ 823 BGB"), or a case reference — even if you only know it approximately.
- Read a statute and see which judgments refer to it.
- Read a judgment; references to laws in the text are clickable, allowing you to follow the reasoning.
- Jump to the official source via the footer of every page.
Important to know
"Not in our database" does not mean "does not exist" — only a portion of all judgments are published at all. If you find an error, you can report it to us directly via "Report an error".
In addition to German law, you will also find decisions of European courts (EuGH/EuG) — multilingual, with a language switcher: see EU Case Law: Looking up ECJ and General Court Judgments.
Coverage & limits
You can see how much is actually included at any time: On the start page of the Legal Library, you will find the "Coverage & limits" section with current figures on laws, decisions, and legal terms. These figures are counted live there — which is why we deliberately do not mention them here, as they would be outdated after the next import.
We are just as clear about what is not included: state law, municipal law, and administrative regulations; Austrian and Swiss law; from EU law, so far only decisions, no texts of regulations or directives.
One point is worth noting because it changes your search: We only have the full text of a fraction of the decisions. A search for a word in the text of a judgment therefore only searches this smaller portion. The citation network — i.e., which decision refers to which statute — covers the entire inventory. If you start with a statute and go from there to the decisions that cite it, you will see more than a pure word search finds.
Network view: who cites whom
On the pages for statutes and decisions, you can also view the citation relationships as a network: click on nodes, move them, and reload neighbors. This costs nothing and does not start any AI. The image always shows a section (below it, it states how many neighbors are visible), and a connection only means "cites" — not that a decision has been confirmed or is still valid.
What is not here
We do not have licensed commentary literature and do not provide recommendations for action from legal publishers. This is a deliberate boundary and not an oversight: Anyone who needs a commentary passage will continue to find it where it is licensed — in a specialist library or with a lawyer (When to Choose a Lawyer Over AI?).
Our goal is different and more focused: not more content, but verifiable content. Every piece of information here leads to a citation that you can open yourself and verify at the official source.
The Legal Library is a reference tool and does not replace legal advice — How reliable is the AI? explains how reliable AI answers are.
Related topics: EU Case Law: Looking up ECJ and General Court Judgments · The "Source verified" label · Adding sources (primary source search) · How reliable is the AI? · Limits of AI & No Legal Advice
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