Centre for the Application of Foreign Law

It is no longer possible to imagine legal relations among individuals and businesses today without the defining features of migration, globalization, and the European internal market. With national boundaries increasingly posing no obstacle to the arrangement of one’s personal and business affairs, German courts are seeing more and more litigation in which the dispositive rules of law are those of a foreign state even though the case is being tried in Germany. The Centre of Expertise for the Application of Foreign Law is tasked with responding to the questions and issues this raises from scholarly as well as from practical standpoints.

Ever since it was founded, in 1926, the Institute has been providing assistance to German courts by producing expert opinions on foreign law. This is one of the ways in which the Institute places its specific expertise and library holdings at the service of the general public. At the same time, working with concrete disputes of the kind that arise in the practice of law is also a valuable impetus for the Institute’s basic research.

The Centre of Expertise for the Application of Foreign Law is responsible on one hand for coordinating the writing of and for reviewing the content of opinions produced in-house. And as a field of application for methods and legal theory, the production of expert opinions is itself an object of academic inquiry.

A second pillar of the Centre, and another area in which theory and practice converge, is the German-language compendium Die deutsche Rechtsprechung auf dem Gebiete des Internationalen Privatrechts (IPRspr) [German precedents in private international law], which is edited at the Institute.

Hamburg Guidelines

Guidelines for ascertaining and applying foreign law in German litigation

The intent behind the Hamburg Guidelines is to facilitate the transparent, efficient, and legally sound handling of foreign law in German litigation. The guidelines were finalized at the Institute by Ralf Michaels, director at the Institute, and by Jan Peter Schmidt, head of the Centre for the Application of Foreign Law. Their completion follows intensive consultations with judges, attorneys, and other practitioners as well as with legal scholars both at the Institute and elsewhere. more

Conference on June 16/17, 2023

Foreign law in the courts

Twenty-first century theory and practice of producing expert opinions on foreign law
On 16–17 June 2023, around fifty legal scholars and practitioners met in Hamburg to trade notes about the role of expert opinions on foreign law in twenty-first century litigation.
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IPRspr

Die deutsche Rechtsprechung auf dem Gebiete des internationalen Privatrechts – IPRspr

IPRspr is a collection of decisions reached by German courts on matters relating to private international law and international civil procedure. It has been published in book form since 1926, but the Institute is now in the process of converting the collection into a free database. more

Legal advice

Legal Advice

Drawing on the broad fundamental research that it conducts, the Institute puts its expertise – within the scope of its capacity at the service of the general public. In this regard, of particular importance are expert opinion papers authored by the Institute. more