About us

The German Law Web Saarbrücken was founded around 1993, but no one seems to know exactly when it was started. Initially, it was initiated by a student, Achim Voermanek, who worked on the project as part of his information science degree.

The prequel to the Law Web was part of the department of philosophy as the law department did not yet own a Gopher server, i.e. a server akin to what we now know as the World Wide Web. This project was probably one of the first legal information servers in Germany.

After some persuasion by the students, two professors joined the project and on the 3rd January 1994 the first collection of legal information was published on the WWW under the title "Legal Information on the Internet".

In February 1994, Professor Herberger, Professor Rüßmann and other interested students presented the first stage of the project with much success. It was decided that a legal WWW server should be established - the contents of which would be discussed in weekly meetings. This meeting could be considered as the true date of inauguration for the Law Web Saarbrücken.

As soon as the project had been established, the editorial team began to look across the border and, as Saarbrücken lies on the border of France a French site was opened in 1997.

This was followed by the English site, which was established by David Thorneloe, who remained a corresponding member of the project for a while and now lives in London. As part of his work for the Law Web Saarbrücken he wrote articles, conducted research for the ‘News of the week’ and translated extracts of judgements of the ‘German’ Federal Constitutional Court. He also published a diary about his life in London. The contents of the old English site are still available in the archive under http://www.jura.uni-sb.de/english/.

Nowadays, the site is managed by native English speaking students participating in one of the exchange programmes organised by the Foreign Exchange Office of the University of the Saarland.

The site provides translations of the news and the link of the week, which are chosen by the editorial team of the internet project on a weekly basis. The site also offers links to German legal material translated into English on the internet.

The English site is supported by our co-operating partner, Judith Holdsworth, an American lawyer in Saarbrücken.