Open access to private international law cases
When a civil case with foreign elements comes before a German court, the court first has to determine whether it has jurisdiction. If so, it must then determine whether German law or foreign law is applicable to the issues. With increasing globalization, such international cases have become much more common. Since it was founded, the Institute has been publishing Die deutsche Rechtsprechung auf dem Gebiete des Internationalen Privatrechts (IPRspr) [German cases in private international law]. The IPRspr appeared in print until 2022. It has now been released as an open access database.
In principle, all German court decisions are in the public domain. However, if one is researching specific areas of the law or trying to find decisions on specific norms or from particular time frames or by a particular court, then having access to an edited collection of cases is an absolute must. The Institute’s serial publication, known to experts in the field as the “IPRspr”, has been systematically documenting German court decisions on PIL and international procedural law since 1926. It covers all those decisions as well as decisions on foreign law for a given calendar year.
“The added value of this collection of decisions is that we boil the judgments down to their private international law aspects and then put them in a systematic order. We also modify the headnotes or write new headnotes if needed”, Jan Peter Schmidt, who directs the Institute’s Centre for the Application of Foreign Law, says. For the publication of the IPRspr, Schmidt relies on a team of academic editors who select and work up all the decisions.
„The added value of this collection of decisions is that
we boil the judgments down to their private international law aspects and then put them in a systematic order.“
– Jan Peter Schmidt –
With the print edition of the IPRspr, there always used to be a lag between the year in which the reported cases came out and the year the corresponding volume was published. Users also had few options for searching the material. Converting to a database has opened up a range of search options; besides searches by legal topic, country, and particular legal norms, time frames, or courts, users can now search the full texts of the decisions. If one of the decisions in the database cites another, a link is provided to the other decision. About 6 500 decisions in the database are currently accessible, each one available for view or download as a PDF and without hitting a paywall. The database contains decisions from 2004 onward; new judgments are added on a continual basis.
“With more than 300 documented court decisions now coming out every year, the IPRspr has long been a treasured resource among both legal scholars and practicing attorneys. But not everyone was familiar with or had access to it. So it was very important to us to optimize it as a digital resource and make it freely available”, Schmidt explains. “Together with the Hamburg Guidelines for Ascertaining and Applying Foreign Law in German Litigation, which are also freely available online, we’ve created an infrastructure for dealing with private international law and foreign private law based on sound legal scholarship.”
Users can access and search the database via www.iprspr.de.
Header und Portrait Jan Peter Schmidt:
© Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law / Johanna Detering
