Law belongs to everyone.

In short

nu:legal Deutsches Recht (recht.nulegal.eu) is a free database of German law, operated by Nulegal GmbH in Potsdam, Germany. It holds German federal statutes and regulations as consolidated reading versions with their historic versions, and German court decisions in full text. There is no sign-up, no advertising and no paywall, and it has been publicly available since July 2026.

Holdings, counted on 2026-08-29: 11,482 statutes and regulations in force with 229,413 individual provisions, 285,552 stored versions going back to 2019, 593,753 court decisions in full text from 945 courts, plus 4,714,128 references from decisions to provisions and 2,272,351 references between decisions. Recounted every night and published on the statistics page and through GET /v1/stats.

Of the German states (Länder), the statutes of Brandenburg, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Sachsen, Bayern are held in full text; the remaining 12 are represented by their case law, and their statutes are being added.

Of European Union law, the General Data Protection Regulation and the case law of the Court of Justice are included; the rest of Union law is not. Commentary, textbooks, journal articles and contract templates are not included: this database reproduces the legal material, it does not interpret it. It is not legal advice and does not replace it.

Status of the texts

German statutes and court decisions are official works and are in the public domain under § 5 UrhG. The texts here are unofficial reading versions. For a federal statute the binding text is the one promulgated in the Bundesgesetzblatt (recht.bund.de); for a statute of a Land it is that Land's gazette; for a judgment it is the version issued by the court itself. Every page and every downloadable file states which source it came from, on which date it was retrieved, and where the authentic version lives.

Decisions carry the licence of the source they came from. Decisions of lower courts obtained through Open Legal Data are under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 and carry that attribution on the page and in every downloaded file. The full list of channels, with licences, is on the German page under Quellen.

For machines

Text and data mining is expressly permitted, for commercial purposes included. There is one condition: automated access must not present itself as a human visitor. Please use a user agent that names your operator or carries a contact route, honour robots.txt including its Crawl-Delay, and do not circumvent technical access restrictions. The binding wording is in the terms of use; the machine-readable form is /.well-known/tdmrep.json, which declares "tdm-reservation": 0 for the whole corpus.

There is a JSON API with no key and no registration: /developers for the rules and examples, /docs for the OpenAPI specification. A summary written for language models is at /llms.txt, and the complete inventory of documents is in the sitemap index. There is no bulk dump.

Every provision and every headnote paragraph has its own permanent anchor, so a citation can address the passage rather than the document: /gesetze/BGB/823#abs-2, /rechtsprechung/{court}/{date}/{docket}#rd_13. The full undertaking is at /vernetzung.

Who runs it, and what Nulegal does commercially

Nulegal GmbH, Babelsberger Straße 16, 14473 Potsdam, Germany, registered under HRB 42127 P (Impressum, the legally binding identity page).

Commercially, nu:legal is a legal technology product for companies: it handles routine work in German employment law and data protection law — answering questions, drafting documents, running workflows built by lawyers — and adds a review by a lawyer when the stakes are high. That product is at nulegal.eu and is separate from this database.

This database is free, carries no advertising, requires no account, and is usable without any connection to the commercial product. It exists because statutes and judgments govern everyone's life, and reading them should not cost anything.

Corrections, questions and press: hello@nulegal.de.

More

The German version of this page, which carries the full source documentation and the list of known limitations, is at Über diese Datenbank. How this corpus compares with the other freely available sources for German law, measured and dated, is at Quellenvergleich. What the terms permit is at Nutzungsbedingungen; what is collected is at Datenschutz.