Talk:Judiciary of Germany

This article was cited by Harvard Law Review, however, it was copy and pasted from the Library of Congress' country studies work. Lotsofissues 04:03, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC

It's surprising that this information comes from the Library of Congress because it contains a couple of inaccuracies and even one or two outright mistakes. I'll look into correcting these later 0:33, 1 Jun 2005 (CEST)

Done. (I hope :) Hazzl 15:28, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The part on specialized courts is incorrect as it states: “In these courts, individuals can seek compensation from the government for any harm caused by incorrect administrative actions by officials.“ Generally such a compensation is sought in the ordinary courts, see section 40 Verwaltungsgerichtsordnung (Rules of the Administrative Courts). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.133.7.37 (talk) 14:11, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Other peoples' edits
OK, it appears other people are actually editing this article now. That's good. Unfortunately, other people are making edits without giving references, and whats more the edits directly contradict the given references. As such, I am reverting many of them. The following are common edits I have seen, some I have reverted, some I have not:


 * The size of the Oberlandesgericht trial court. Casper & Zeisel 1972, p. 142, gives the composition as 5 judges at the trial level. Jehle & BMJ 2009, p. 23, gives it as 3 or 5 judges. Therefore I think the more current reference, as 3 or 5 judges, is more correct. I incorrectly reverted John Doe 1346's edits (edit 502566475) on the issue; 77.197.156.96 has since re-added the information, which I shall not revert.


 * Whether the ordinary courts hear civil (ie non-criminal) cases, and should be termed "ordinary" as the refs do, or if they do not and should be called "criminal". None of the references given speak to non-criminal cases, but do refer to the courts as "ordinary" and not "criminal". I did find really old books like "Commercial laws of England, Scotland, Germany and France" (1915) by the US Dept. of Commerce, p. 28, and other similar texts that refer to civil chambers in the Amtsgericht. ("Procedural justice" (1997) by Rohl, p. 213.) I just searched Google.


 * A related issue: are these names, Schöffengericht, Strafkammer, Schwurgericht, and Strafsenat just names for the chambers / senates of the different courts?


 * Whether the Schöffengericht has juridiction over Verbrechen where the sentences are more than 1 year. Jehle & BMJ 2009, p. 23.


 * Is the Schwurgericht translated as a "jury court", and does this information belong in the summary where there is no main article?


 * Does information regarding the Baader-Meinhof group trial before a Oberlandesgerichte Strafsenat belong in the summary where there is a main article?

Int21h (talk) 22:54, 2 August 2012 (UTC) Int21h (talk) 22:59, 2 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Ad 2: "Ordinary" means "civil or criminal".
 * Ad 3,5: The Amtsgericht in criminal cases judges either as der Strafrichter (the penal judge) or as the Schöffengericht, depending on the importance of the crime. The Landgericht in criminal cases judges as (little or big) Strafkammer or as a Schwurgericht. The Schwurgericht is essentially competent for murder and for crimes resulting in death, and it used to have a jury until the 1920s, hence the name (in nowadays' language, it was then a Geschworenengericht, to differentiate). Now the Schwurgericht is essentially the big Strafkammer, which is however not allowed to decide to lower her size. Strafsenat is just the name for any court from Oberlandesgericht onwards insofar as it rules in criminal matters. (And regularly also specific bodies within these courts, which are called to these decisions.)--93.133.222.245 (talk) 12:08, 22 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Is this the place to point to issues that need to be addresses about the type and functioning of the legal system in Germany, especially some historical issues like the way the judicial system and judges from the Nazi system still are involved in the system and till very recently some Nazi Judges were still actively judging in processes (Like the German Wikipedia article "Ungesuehnte Nazijustiz") ; as exposed by Reinhard Strecker. There are also serious systemic failures, like the nearness of judges and state prosecutors, with the catastrophic misjudgements based on the 'Gutachten' System (e.g. the Gustl Mollath case). SidGaia (talk) 20:22, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

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 * I will get on my soapbox a bit here. We have to think about wikipedia in the long term.  If Wikipedia is going away in a few decades (rather than having "evolved" to some higher form), then we might all just as well be playing video games as correcting references in Wikipedia.
 * On its face, it seems better to have bots do this, even if the bots sometimes leave something to be desired. Then again, this means that we're not really changing the O-level of human effort required (i.e. it's still O(n)).  But this approach really has a sort of code smell.  At the very least, the bots should just be dumping the references into a pot, separating the process that identifies the bad refs from the process that figures out what the good refs should be.  I don't really claim to understand Wikidata, but I think this would be somewhat analogous to that, i.e. you have a big table of references, where access into the table is based on the assertion you're making.  The main point being that we only need to fix something in one place.  This has a lot of other implications, but I'll leave that to the reader's imagination.
 * Anyway, I updated the "wayback" link that the archive inserted to a live link at the original site. I hope others feel my effort was worthwhile, but it's okay if they don't. Fabrickator (talk) 17:39, 29 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I think you're touching on WikiCite and Wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData. int21h (talk · contribs · email) 01:02, 1 May 2017 (UTC)