Open Legal Data

Open Legal Data is a free, open platform that publishes German legal material as machine-readable open data. It gathers court decisions and legislation, links them through an automatically extracted citation graph, and makes the whole collection available to anyone building legal tools, research datasets, or RAG and fine-tuning pipelines. The project aligns itself with the Open Data principles and the Free Access to Law movement, and its platform source code is published on GitHub under the MIT licence.

You can reach the data in several ways. The REST API serves records as JSON and needs no account for reading, although anonymous use is capped at 100 requests per day. Registering for a free API key raises that to 5,000 requests per hour, and write access requires authentication. For larger needs the project points to its bulk dumps, and the May 2026 release is mirrored on the Hugging Face Hub as three datasets (court-decisions-germany, laws-germany and legal-citation-graph-germany) that load directly with the datasets library. That release holds 423,941 court decisions, 113,537 law sections across 7,058 law books, and 7,438,459 citation edges. Each decision and law carries both the original HTML and a cleaned Markdown version, with reference markers stored as JSON, which makes the corpus straightforward to chunk and embed.

For RAG and AI work this is a rare source of German-language, civil-law material, a useful counterweight to the Anglo-American common-law collections we list such as CourtListener and the Caselaw Access Project, and a national complement to the EU-wide EUR-Lex. It suits retrieval over German statutes and case law, citation-aware retrieval that follows the graph, and fine-tuning on legal German.

The licence position is clear. The collection and its metadata are released under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) v1.0, which permits commercial use but requires attribution and imposes share-alike on any adapted database. The underlying acts, decisions and official head notes are not copyright-protected under UrhG section 5. Coverage is Germany only and in German.