openlegaldata/laws-germany

Open Legal Data: Laws Germany

This dataset is a preprocessed export of the German laws indexed by the Open Legal Data Platform. Each row is a single law section, carrying both the original HTML and a Markdown-converted body.

The dataset was automatically generated and uploaded to the HF hub using oldp-toolkit.

Available dumps

Date	Configs
2026-05-20	dump-20260520, dump-20260520-10k, dump-20260520-1k

Data format

Each sample has the following format:

{
    "id": 12345,
    "book": 1110,
    "book_code": "BGB",
    "book_slug": "bgb",
    "title": "§ 1 Beginn der Rechtsfähigkeit",
    "section": "1",
    "slug": "1",
    "content": "<P>Die Rechtsfähigkeit ...</P>",
    "markdown_content": "Die Rechtsfähigkeit ...",
    "created_date": "2020-02-06T11:01:05Z",
    "updated_date": "2020-12-10T13:50:38Z",
    "amtabk": null,
    "kurzue": null,
    "doknr": "BJNR001950896BJNE00010",
    "order": 1
}

The content field holds the original HTML. The markdown_content field is the HTML content converted to Markdown.

Citations between laws (and from laws to cases) are not included in this dataset; they are published separately at openlegaldata/legal-citation-graph-germany.

Discord

We're back! This project is getting a fresh update - join us on Discord to help revive it.

Citation

If you use this data, please cite our research paper:

@inproceedings{10.1145/3383583.3398616,
author = {Ostendorff, Malte and Blume, Till and Ostendorff, Saskia},
title = {Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450375856},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3383583.3398616},
doi = {10.1145/3383583.3398616},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2020},
pages = {385–388},
numpages = {4},
keywords = {open data, open source, legal information system, legal data},
location = {Virtual Event, China},
series = {JCDL '20}
}

License

In Germany, acts, statutory instruments, official decrees and official notices, as well as decisions (including court decisions) and official head notes of decisions do not enjoy copyright protection (UrhG § 5).

The collection and metadata has the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0.