Very little attention has been given to if, when and how the legal form addresses antisemitism. This project’s overarching goal is to help fill this research gap by making relevant court cases accessible. Finding and accessing court decisions in general is challenging. Published law reports, case law digests, legal databases or other online case law collections typically favour decisions from higher courts or those considered pivotal to legal doctrine and overlook older cases and decisions from lower courts. This lack of transparency and accessibility leaves researchers and legal practitioners without crucial information. Moreover, the available cases in online databases predominantly focus on compensation for Nazi-related crimes, leaving contemporary instances of antisemitism underrepresented.

Seeing Antisemitism Through Law: a case law database is designed to bridge this gap by offering:

• Easy access: ensuring that decisions relating to antisemitism are readily available to the public, facilitating both awareness and understanding.
• Support for legal practitioners: providing a comprehensive repository of historic and contemporary cases, empowering legal professionals to approach cases related to antisemitism with confidence.
• A catalyst for research: stimulating in-depth investigations into the relationship between antisemitism and legal frameworks, and fostering a deeper comprehension of how justice systems have interpreted antisemitism over time.
• Awareness and understanding: highlighting the critical issue of antisemitism within judicial proceedings and promoting a broader awareness of its legal implications.

The filter menu on the right allows you to narrow your search by choosing a period, a specific Year, a Type of Court, an Area of Law or a Subject when in cards mode. Some filters, like Year and Type of Court, rely on meta-data attached to court cases. The filter category Subject sorts cases into different thematic groups. This makes it easy to find cases relating to topics such as Compensation, Restitution, Artistic Freedom and Israel-related Incidents.

These are the most frequent subjects:

Importantly, the subjects are not mutually exclusive and thus several subjects can be assigned to a single court decision.

Court decisions in France, Germany and Poland are in the public domain and can therefore be published and distributed with few restrictions. ¹ In the United Kingdom, law report publishers were solely responsible for the publication of cases – at least, prior to 20002 – rather than courts.² Authors base their headnote and summary of the case on a judge’s text or the transcription of a verbal judgment and thus retain the intellectual property of the published judgment. ³ As a result, and at least for the time being, UK decisions are not published so the database instead provides a link to the decision, which is sometimes behind a paywall.

Law relies on many abbreviations. To make this database as accessible as possible, we list the most important abbreviations and their full terms here.

Germany: