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.

Aims and scope

The Institute has published the collection of decisions known as “IPRspr” since its foundation in 1926.The aim of the work has always been to provide a complete and systematic documentation of the case law of German courts on matters relating to private international law and international civil procedure. Indexes provided as part of the publication (statutory indexes, case name indexes, and subject-matter indexes) allow users to readily find relevant decisions and passages.

Institutional framework

From 1964 to 2004, IPRspr was supervised by Jan Kropholler; from 2005 to 2022 Rainer Kulms took on this task; Jan Peter Schmidt has been responsible for the Institute series since 2023. In fall of 2024 the series is to be made freely accessible in the form of an electronic database. 

Since 2020 a team comprising staff members and software developers have been configuring and testing what is to be a new editing and research tool. The aim of the project is to convert the publication such that the gathering, processing and presentation of decisions occurs in the framework of an online database. The volume published in 2022, containing decisions from 2019, will be the last printed edition of IPRspr after almost one hundred years of existence. Its immediate successor will be launched as an Open Access publication under the Institute’s own direction and will offer decisions not only from 2020 onwards, but also from earlier years (initially from 2004).

The selection and editing of decisions will be carried out by a team of editors; current members are Judith Onwuagbaizu. Sabine Giemsch has worked on the IPRspr editorial team since 2020 and is responsible for processing all decisions in accordance with the Institute's editorial guidelines and preparing them for publication.

Information for readers

The identification and collection of relevant decisions is done at the Institute. The IPRspr editorial team is happy to receive information on current decisions which can be taken into account in the database, particularly as of yet unpublished decisions. 

The Institute will announce the public launch of the new database as soon as possible. Until that point, already published volumes can still be consulted in the usual libraries, and printed volumes are still available from the publisher Mohr Siebeck.

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