[Bewelge]

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 :)

[atVelocet]

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?

[Bewelge]

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.

[atVelocet]

This wild and also has some cruel implications. Thank you for this info!

[Propelloni]

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]