New Legal Information Portal
Making German federal law accessible as open data
To date, there is no centralized federal platform where laws and regulations, court decisions, and administrative rules are openly and easily accessible to everyone. This is because the legal information provided free of charge by the federal government is currently spread across three portals: 1. Laws-on-the-Internet, 2. Case Law-on-the-Internet, and 3. Administrative Rules-on-the-Internet.
Finding relevant legal information poses a major hurdle for citizens and organizations, particularly since the documents contain very little metadata. Access to this information does not reflect the current state of the art, and reusing the data is difficult.
To make legal information accessible as open data, we are working with the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection to develop a unified, modern, and user-friendly legal information portal for publicly accessible searches. The portal provides citizens with barrier-free access to current laws and regulations, court decisions, and administrative regulations. By also publishing historical and future versions of laws and regulations, the new portal provides a significantly larger volume of data. All of this legal information includes comprehensive metadata as open data.
A prerequisite for the legal information portal is the creation of a federal data repository for the federal government’s legal information. This will enable the federal government to freely manage its legal information and make it available to citizens, as well as to businesses, academia, and civil society, without discrimination.
The project complies with the requirements of the Data Use Act and supports the EU Open Data Directive, which promotes the publication of dynamic data and the development of application programming interfaces (APIs).
A pilot phase for the legal information portal has been underway since 2025. According to current plans, completion is scheduled for 2028.
Special features
- Open API for subsequent use of the data provided
- The public is involved in the development process to ensure that their wishes and needs are taken into account
Facts and figures
April 2025: Legal information search service in the testing phase: faster and more direct access to court decisions, laws, and regulations via an open API
Migration of approx. 50 GB of data (approx. 2.5 million data records)
Read more about this project
