European Databases | Bürgerservice Hessenrecht

“Bürgerservice Hessenrecht” is a database dedicated to the laws, regulations and case law of Hesse – the fifth largest of the 16 federal states of Germany in population and home to the financial capital Frankfurt am Main.

• Hesse covers an area of around 21,000 square kilometres in west-central Germany and has a population of approximately 6,2 million people.
• The state is criss-crossed by multiple rivers and around 40 % of its land are covered by forest, making it the greenest state in Germany.
• Hesse is not only famous for its major international financial centre, it is also the birthplace of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and was frequented by the Brothers Grimm who worked and lived in the state for around 30 years.

• “Bürgerservice Hessenrecht” is the official database for laws, regulations and case law of Hesse. Those three categories are displayed on the left side of the screen, each provided with a drop-down menu and divided into subcategories.
• The collection of case law contains decisions of the Hessian courts that were considered worthy for publication by the “Dokumentationsstellen”. Next to that, all currently applicable laws and regulations that are published in the official gazettes of the State of Hessen can be accessed.
• The search function has many features and enables an effective and user-friendly search. The database provides full text search, auto-completion and shows the number of hits for each query.


• Further, the search does not differentiate between upper and lower case and the “§”-sign is not mandatory for looking up legislation. Search terms should be entered in nominative case and when searching for phrases quotation marks are needed.
• The navigation through the individual hits is quite easy. Additional information like the name of the deciding court, date, ECLI, relevant law and type of legislation is provided.
• The technical implementation of the database is carried out by the German company juris GmbH.

• By clicking a little icon on the top-right of the screen a pdf-file opens for download and print.
• The documents are only available in German.