German statutes in English/Deutsche Gesetze auf Englisch

It can be useful to see an English translation of a German statute one is quoting in a translation. At worst, such translations may contain so many errors that they are not worth consulting. Better ones may give a springboard for ideas. And the best may be very useful, especially if they draw your attention to elements of the statute that would not have been clear merely from the short section you need to translate.

Today I was translating a website that contained links to a page of the Bundesanwaltskammer containing, inter alia, a link to a PDF file with a translation of the Bundesrechtsanwaltsordnung (Federal Lawyers’ Act).

You can find a list of German statutes and other legislation translated into English at the German Law Archive and another one at Robin Stocks’ Carob.

However, as I’ve said before. there are more statutes in English on the Web than linked at those sites. In particular, new and important statutes are likely to be somewhere. Perhaps I should study how to search the Deep Web. LLRX.com had an article on that only this January.

LATER NOTE (December 2011): The site to find German statutes in English is www.cgerli.org. The German Law Archive site has some too, and they may also be found via juris. But the cgerli (Centre for German Legal Information) site allows you to search by German title, which is ideal, and tries to keep links to all translations of existing statutes – although unfortunately for us translators, I believe it does not keep translations of statutes which are known to be out of date, although these do often have to be quoted in translations.

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