Decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court

Decisions of the BVerfG as bound books in the dressing room of the judges at the office in Karlsruhe-Waldstadt

The decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court ( BVerfGE ) are an authorized collection of the important decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany published by the Association of Judges of the Federal Constitutional Court in private sideline activity . The official texts are published there in full. The senate decisions are published by JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck) , Tübingen .

From the establishment of the court in 1951 to 2012, 129 volumes of this collection of decisions were published with a total of around 3,000 judgments and resolutions (as of October 2012). In 2016 the collection comprised 139 volumes. Since 2004, twelve volumes of the BVerfGK decision collection have been published with a total of almost 800 resolutions - a targeted selection from more than 25,000 constitutional complaints (as of March 2010).

How to quote

The individual decisions are cited in the form “BVerfGE volume , start page < quotation point >”, for example “BVerfGE 98, 218 <252>”. This means that the cited decision is in volume 98 of the decision collection and begins on page 218; the point that matters to the citing person is on page 252. B. that “a special legal basis is not required for the introduction of the new spelling rules in school lessons in the federal states”. Other forms of brackets are also common to identify the quotation point (the Federal Constitutional Court itself uses the square brackets “[]” in its judgments).

Chamber decisions

Between 2004 and 2014 a collection of chamber decisions (BVerfGK) was published in addition to the BVerfGE collection of decisions. This contained selected decisions of the individual chambers of the Constitutional Court with further constitutional statements that were significant beyond the individual case . The BVerfGK was published by CF Müller , Heidelberg .