About FamRZ

FamRZ

FamRZ — the Zeitschrift für das gesamte Familienrecht — is Germany's leading legal journal for family law, published twice a month by the Gieseking publishing house of Bielefeld. Since its first issue in the mid-1950s, it has been the profession's central forum for child-custody law, maintenance law, divorce law, and guardianship law, printing more than 1,200 court decisions a year alongside scholarly essays, maintenance tables, and book reviews. Cited simply as "FamRZ, year, page," it is the citation standard of German family-law practice.

Overview

The Zeitschrift für das gesamte Familienrecht appears twice monthly (vierzehntäglich) and has been published since 1953/54, making it one of Germany's longest-running specialist legal journals. Its ISSN 0044-2410 documents the unbroken periodical record. The journal is published by the Verlag Ernst und Werner Gieseking GmbH of Bielefeld in association with the Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung für Familienrecht e.V. (Bonn), the scholarly association for family law.

The readership is the family-law profession in its entirety: judges, attorneys, notaries, Rechtspfleger (judicial officers), legal scholars, staff of social authorities and youth offices, social workers, guardians, guardianship authorities and associations, and staff of social-welfare and educational-support offices. For these practitioners, the FamRZ is not optional reading but the working record of their field: the decisions that determine how the law is applied, the tables that determine the amounts, the essays that shape the arguments. A family-law attorney's library without the FamRZ is, in the profession's eyes, incomplete.

The journal's content divides into scholarly essays on the various branches of family law (and partly inheritance law), documentation (maintenance tables, maintenance guidelines), book reviews of family-law literature, and — the largest part — case law: essentially all decisions of the federal courts on family-law questions, plus decisions of the lower courts, particularly the family and guardianship courts, printed mostly unabridged and frequently with annotations.

History

The FamRZ was created on the initiative of Friedrich Wilhelm Bosch and published its first issue in 1954 (the journal's bibliographic record dates the founding to 1953) at the Verlag Ernst und Werner Gieseking in Bielefeld. The Gieseking house had been founded in 1937 by Werner Gieseking as the "Deutscher Heimatverlag," initially publishing regional literature and the writings and calendars of the German Youth Hostel Association. After the Second World War, Gieseking expanded the program into contemporary history and began founding legal journals — first, in 1948, Der Deutsche Rechtspfleger (Rpfleger), which still exists, followed by the FamRZ.

The timing was significant: the young Federal Republic was rebuilding its legal order, and family law — marriage, children, maintenance, guardianship — was a field of intense legislative and judicial development. The FamRZ became the field's documentary record, publishing the decisions that built modern German family law: the maintenance jurisprudence, the evolving law of parental custody, the reform of divorce law, and later the transformation of child law through the Kindschaftsrechtsreform and the modernization of guardianship law. Each legislative wave — and family law has seen many — was accompanied, documented, and debated in the journal's pages. In 1991 the publisher brought out its first CD-ROM — the FamRZ in electronic form, which quickly became the house's flagship — followed by two further legal databases and an electronic statute collection. This early digital bet — at a time when most legal publishers still thought in paper — positioned Gieseking for the database era; the CD-ROM's annual editions, each including the full text of several older volumes, were the print journal's electronic shadow long before the web made such archives routine. Since 1994 an electronic version has appeared annually on CD-ROM, including the full text of several older volumes; via the publisher's "Gieseking-digital" platform, all journal content going back to 1986 is available online.

Today the Gieseking program is purely legal, with emphases on family law, judicial-officer law, civil procedure, voluntary jurisdiction, international private and procedural law, criminal law, criminal procedure, and public law. Alongside the FamRZ, the house publishes two further legal journals — IPRax and the Rechtspfleger Studienhefte — plus handbooks, statute collections, commentaries, series, festschrifts, and textbooks, including the FamRZ-Bücher.

Coverage and Content

The journal's subject matter is the entire family law: Kindschaftsrecht (child law — custody, contact, child protection), Unterhaltsrecht (maintenance law), Scheidungsrecht (divorce law), and Betreuungs- und Vormundschaftsrecht (guardianship and custodianship law), with regular excursions into inheritance law and the many adjacent fields — procedural law, adoption law, labor and social law, civil-service and remuneration law, criminal law, tax law, educational-support law, immigration law, and the law of non-marital partnerships.

The case-law section is the journal's core: more than 1,200 court decisions a year from the whole field of marriage, family, and child law, with particular attention to the intersections with inheritance and farm law, printed almost entirely unabridged and frequently annotated. The unabridged publication matters: family-law practice lives in the details of the reasoning, and the FamRZ's commitment to full-text publication — rather than the headnote summaries that suffice in other fields — reflects the journal's documentary mission. For practitioners, the FamRZ is the first place to find the new maintenance guidelines, the latest federal-court decisions on custody, and the evolving jurisprudence of the family courts.

The scholarly essays address the field's doctrinal questions; the documentation section carries the practical tools — maintenance tables (Unterhaltstabellen) and maintenance guidelines (Unterhaltsleitlinien) that determine the actual euro amounts of support payments; the book reviews survey the family-law literature. The citation convention is part of the profession's grammar: articles are cited as "FamRZ, year, page"; for reprinted decisions, the court is additionally named.

Organization and Ownership

The FamRZ is published by the Verlag Ernst und Werner Gieseking GmbH, Deckertstraße 30, 33617 Bielefeld (phone 0521-14674; famrz@giesekingverlag.de), in association with the Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung für Familienrecht e.V., Bonn. The publisher is a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft rechts- und staatswissenschaftlicher Verlage (ARSV), the Deutscher Familiengerichtstag e.V., and the Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung für Familienrecht e.V.

As an independent specialist legal publisher, Gieseking's economics rest on subscriptions from the profession — courts, law firms, notaries' offices, authorities, and university libraries — plus the digital database business (Gieseking-digital) and the book program, including the FamRZ-Bücher series that extends the journal's brand into monographic publishing. The journal's status as the field's leading title gives it a durable subscription base: for family-law practitioners, the FamRZ is a professional necessity, and the institutional subscriptions of courts and libraries provide a stable foundation that few trade journals enjoy. Circulation figures and financial details are not publicly confirmed.

Digital Presence

The journal's digital home is famrz.de, the publisher's platform for the title, presenting the journal, the publishing house, and subscription information. Since the pioneering 1991 CD-ROM, the electronic FamRZ has been the house's flagship digital product; the "Gieseking-digital" platform now offers the complete journal archive back to 1986 online, making seven decades of family-law jurisprudence searchable.

The digital transformation of a 1950s legal journal into a database business illustrates the economics of modern legal publishing: the print issues provide the authoritative periodical record, while the digital archive monetizes the accumulated knowledge. For the family-law practitioner, the ability to search the FamRZ archive — every maintenance decision, every custody ruling, every doctrinal essay — is the journal's contemporary form. In a field where the last federal-court decision can change the advice given to a client, the FamRZ's twice-monthly rhythm and its digital archive together provide the currency and the memory of German family law.