Finding German Law in English

The Centre for German Legal Information (CGerLI) is a website offering a comprehensive and freely accessible database of electronic materials on German law. It brings together English translations of court decisions, legislation, articles and other law-related documents scattered over the internet and adds them to their own collection of German legal information.

As the database is being continuously expanded, they welcome contributions and suggestions. Please send your comments or new materials via email to new(at)cgerli.org.

This website was made possible with the support and cooperation of the German Federal Foreign Office.

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Books 1 & 2 of the BGB

The German Ministry of Justice has reposted books 1 & 2 of the BGB in English to their site after almost a year from the withdrawl of the English translation. You can find the new translation of books 1 & 2 here.

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The Big German Book (BGB) - in English

A while back, the German Ministry of Justice put out an official translation in English of the German Civil Code based on the version promulgated on 02 Jan. 2002. They pulled this translation from the net shortly after publishing due to flaws in the translation (click here for the Ministry's translation page). I thought it was gone forever but I was able to find that the University of Edinburgh School of Law has a copy of the translation posted here. While it is not an "official" translation it can at least help researchers unfamiliar with German.

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Foreign Law Translations - France, Germany, Israel & Austria

The University of Texas at Austin School of Law has a site at the Institute of Trasnational Law dedicated to provide translations of French, German, Israeli, and Austrian materials. The French and German sites are subdivided into legislation and decision areas while the Israeli and Austrian sites only hold decisions... While the German site has many dead links, it still provides acces to translated sections of the German Civil Code, the official site for which was recently pulled because of translation problems. For a more comprehensive collection of translated German materials, check the German Law Archive. This Archive was started by the University of Oxford and it is presently on its own domain, iuscomp.org, which also hosts the Oxford University Comparative Law Forum and the website of the Institute of European and Comparative Law of the University of Oxford.

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