Written by Erik Sonne
With the launch of Domsdatabasen hosted by Danmarks Domstole, something that for many years seemed like a Fata Morgana has now, in 2022, finally come into being.
Who has access?
Access to Domsdatabasen is public and free, and the overall ambition is to make the judgments and rulings of all Danish courts of law available to professionals, media, academia, and ordinary citizens alike.
What will you find?
By default, the database contains post-launch rulings, but it also comprises historical contents, mainly from the past 20 years, and a few rulings dating back even further. For instance, all historical rulings by the Court of Impeachment of the Realm (Rigsretten) are available from the database. For a start, rulings from the higher courts, i.e. the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the Maritime and Commercial Court, have been made a priority. As of May 2022, close to 1500 judgments and rulings are available from the database – of these about half originate with the county courts.
Domsdatabasen comprises civil cases as well as selected criminal cases of particular public interest. Once they are fully digitized, other criminal cases will also be available from the database.
Rulings are pseudonymised in that names of people will be removed whereas names of legal representatives and court officials from higher courts will remain visible.
Not quite there yet
Far from all judgments and rulings are available via Domsdatabasen as of yet. This means that you still rely on classic tools for a full picture, including UfR - Ugeskrift for Retsvæsen - as well as legal journals and books.
Check out the CBS Library guide to Danish legal resources
Fun fact
As suggested elsewhere, the implementation of Domsdatabasen proved to be an enormously protracted process. As early as the 1980s, voices were calling for the implementation of a national database of judgments and rulings. An interim result of these efforts was the transfer of administrative decisions, but not judgments, to the legal database Retsinformation. At the end of the 1990s, the Justice Department reached a decision in principle on the implementation of a national database of judgments and rulings. It took another 20 years for this decision to bear fruit.
If you want to explore this development in more detail, you will find an insightful and fun account by Professor Mads Bryde Andersen in his UfR paper Ugeskrift for Retsvæsen gennem 150 år (U.2017B.1)