All of German federal law. One search.
Jura Kontext is a research platform for legal professionals that we developed and operate ourselves. It searches German federal law, EU law, the case law of the German federal courts and openly licensed legal literature in a single query. Instead of guessing keywords, you describe the facts of the case in your own words. Jura Kontext finds the relevant provisions and decisions, shows the citation network around them and links every document to its official source.
The data basis
All content comes from official primary sources and openly licensed literature and is updated daily:
- Federal law: All federal acts and statutory instruments in their current consolidated version, several thousand acts with more than a hundred thousand individual provisions.
- Case law: Decisions of the federal courts (BGH, BVerfG, BAG, BSG, BFH, BVerwG, BPatG) from 2010 onwards, with official chains of provisions and ECLI identifiers.
- EU law: Regulations and directives in force as well as the case law of the CJEU and the General Court, including the citation relations annotated in the EUR-Lex Cellar.
- Open-access literature: The first open-access commentary on the German Basic Law, the open textbooks and casebooks of OpenRewi, and the Europe-wide GDPR decision database GDPRhub, each with author attribution and licence notice.
- Legislative materials: For every federal act, the legislative procedures with printed papers and the legislator’s explanatory memoranda, live from the Bundestag’s documentation system.
The citation graph
Every provision and every decision is connected to what it cites and what cites it. More than a million references form a network of statutory sections, judgments and EU acts. At a glance you can see which decisions have interpreted a provision, which provisions a judgment relies on, and which commentaries the courts cite most often.
Search that understands the facts
Under the hood, Jura Kontext combines several methods that we benchmarked against each other: a semantic vector search across provisions, decisions and literature, a classic full-text search with automatic query expansion, and a final ranking stage in which a language model orders the hits and marks, by the standard of a legal opinion, which of them are truly pertinent. Direct citations such as “§ 823 BGB” are recognised and resolved immediately. The result is traceable research in which every reference points to the original.
Built to be legally sound
A legal database has to comply with the law itself. Jura Kontext stores and displays full texts only where copyright permits it: official works and openly licensed literature. Content that is protected but freely accessible is kept solely as a search index with a short excerpt and a link to the original, including a check for opt-out signals before every retrieval. Authors of open commentaries are credited with every hit.
For your tools
Jura Kontext provides a JSON API and an MCP server. This allows the research to be integrated directly into AI assistants and your own applications: an assistant can research a set of facts, back up its findings with official links and load provisions or decisions in full text. On this basis we also build custom AI assistants for law firms, legal departments and associations.
Status and outlook
Jura Kontext is in use and is being expanded continuously, among other things with the case law of the state courts, administrative regulations and further open commentaries. A dedicated product website is under construction. If you would like to get to know Jura Kontext or connect it to your tools via API and MCP, get in touch.
Your benefits
- Federal law, EU law, federal courts and open literature in one search
- Citation graph with more than a million references between provisions and decisions
- Daily updates from official primary sources, every reference with a source link
- Integration with AI assistants and your own applications via API and MCP