You can query decisions of the federal court directly from our database. You may use easy or complex search tools (boolean search).

Easy search

Open the easy search form, and enter the keywords. A fulltext search is being performed over the full dataset. You may use concatenations and boolean operatory (see below).

Boolean Search

The boolean search allows you to pinpoint your searches while maintaining flexibility. The search is performed over the whole dataset. For searching, open the database query form.

You may use all relevant fields for your searches. In each field, you may use several keywords linked to each other with boolean operators:

• +
  
  A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.
   
• -
  
  A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned.
  
  Note: The - operator acts only to exclude rows that are otherwise matched by other search terms. Thus, a boolean-mode search that contains only terms preceded by - returns an empty result. It does not return “all rows except those containing any of the excluded terms.”
   
• (no operator)
  
  By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the rows that contain it are rated higher.
   
• ( )
  
  Parentheses group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
   
• *
  
  The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.
   
• "
  
  A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (“"”) characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.
   

Examples for the boolean search

The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean full-text operators:

• apple banana
  
  Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.
   
• +apple +juice
  
  Find rows that contain both words.
  
  
• +apple macintosh
  
  Findet Datensätze, die das Wort „apple“ enthalten, stuft aber solche Datensätze höher ein, die auch „macintosh“ enthalten.
   
• +apple -macintosh
  
  Find rows that contain the word “apple”, but rank rows higher if they also contain “macintosh”.
   
• +apple +(turnover strudel)
  
  Find rows that contain the words “apple” and “turnover”, or “apple” and “strudel” (in any order).
   
• apple*
  
  Find rows that contain words such as “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, or “applet”.
   
• "some words"
  
  Find rows that contain the exact phrase “some words” (for example, rows that contain “some words of wisdom” but not “some noise words”). Note that the “"” characters that enclose the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotation marks that enclose the search string itself.

Searching by database queries

In the search form for database queries, you also find the possibility to write the query yourself. It is recommended to build the query by using the form fields and then altering the generated query.

Each line represents one query criterion, and is introduced with the shortcut to the field you want to search for. The second part of the line represents the boolean search query.

Example:

• FN: S2013*
  GL: +(apple pear) +(pie cake) -macintosh
   
  Searches for the case number (FN) starting with S2013, and the Subject (GL) must contain the words apple or pear, and pie or cake, but not the word macintosh. Found are Apple Pie, Pear Pie, but not Apple Macintosh.
  
  
• UV: 2014-01-01
  VA: 2
  
  Searches for all decisions with a decision date (UV) starting from 01.01.2014, which are procedural decisions (procedure form VA). The language independent number 2 represents the chosen category. The most easy way to find out which number represents which category, is to build the query with the query form and finding the category numbers in the query string, which is built by the system. If you want to specify several categories in your search query, concatenate the numbers with commas.