Very cool! I came across your project last year while building https://digebu.de .
I wanted to build an "IDE-inspired" law reader. It has selection highlighting and you can open references within the same window. It scrapes gesetze-im-internet.de daily, processes the XML to JSONS and builds static HTML pages, hosted on Github pages. The entire build process for the 6000+ pages takes 5-10 minutes. It uses up less than <20% of my actions minutes that come with Github pro.
It was a really fun rabbit hole to go down.
What I found most fascinating is that: There doesn't seem to be an official version of the German law. The state just publishes official announcements like "Law X will be changed as follows", "Law X will be removed" or "Law X will be added". So the official version of the German law really is something akin to a git tree. AFAIK, all consolidated versions are created by private entities.
I did a test by picking a law at random, finding the first time it was published and then applying all the changes from subsequent years. Turns out all available versions (gesetze-im-internet, dejure.org, buzer.de) had at least a couple of small mistakes. I found that quite fascinating (and a little scary).
It's also funny how often laws are referenced that don't even exist anymore. The collection of laws really are is as tidy as you would imagine an 80 year old system, where the maintainers change every 5 years, to be.
Has git ever made the necessary updates so that you can have proper datestamps on the 80 yr old laws? Last I had checked, nothing prior to unix epoch can be put into git.
> Turns out all available versions (gesetze-im-internet, dejure.org, buzer.de) had at least a couple of small mistakes.
Can you say more about what these small mistakes were? Would they affect the interpretation of the law?
In the example I checked the mistakes wouldn't have changed the interpretation. It were mistakes like additional or missing commas, missing spaces or missing articles.
buzer.de actually has a list of things that differ in their consolidation compared to gesetze-im-internet.de: https://www.buzer.de/quality.htm
In that list you can actually find mistakes that would alter the interpretation. But I think this also sounds worse than it is. It's just a funny thought that whatever source you are using, you are essentially trusting one party to not have made any mistakes, consolidating 1000s of pages of pdfs :)
So then what is the official way to get the latest version? I mean… how does the state itself handle those laws or are you telling me that every German court and government agency buys those books?
I'm not sure if they still buy the books, but I know from someone who worked as a judge in Germany, that they personally stopped buying the books only ~5-10 years ago, because they saw that the online availability was good enough now.
But my point is that, as far as I know, there is no official version of the final text. The official publications are made in the Bundesgesetzblatt (which had been privatized in the past, but that's another story). The publications might look like this:
1947: We hereby make the following text a law called Grundgesetz "Artikel I: Human dignity is inviolable"
2026: We hereby change the law called Grundgesetz by changing the first article to say "Human or Alien" instead of "Human".
Now there are a lot of entities that will consolidate these changes into a final text. But this consolidation isn't done officially. So, while in this example its easy to see, that in 2026 the law would read "Human and Alien dignity is inviolable", it becomes less clear when these changes are spread over 80 years and are only available as PDFs.
Laws are distributed through the Bundesgesetzblatt, the official announcement publication for laws of the German Bundestag. Their online presence is here: https://www.recht.bund.de/de/bundesgesetzblatt/bundesgesetzb...
[EDIT: fixed link]