Belgium: IALS Library Guides

Guide last updated by Alice Tyson, May 2022

The Kingdom of Belgium is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Belgium was formed into an independent state in 1830, and is one of the modern nation-states configured out of long independent linguistic regions. Official languages are French, Dutch and German. In 1957, Belgium was one of the original signatories of the Treaty of Rome creating the European Communities, and in 1948 Belgium joined with Luxembourg and the Netherlands in creating the Benelux Economic Union.

At IALS Library, materials covering the jurisdiction of Belgium have the classmark GO6.

The Belgian Constitution was promulgated on 7 February 1831 after the separation of Belgium from the Netherlands. Its principal provisions have remained largely unchanged since that date, although it has been amended on various occasions. The most important amendments occurred in 1989 when three autonomous regions, Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels, were created out of what had been a unitary nation-state. The following versions of the Belgian constitution are available in print at IALS:

Delperee F and Renders D, Code constitutionnel: textes en vigueur au 1 janvier 2005. (5rd edn, Bruylant, 2005)
[French version]

Raworth P (ed), Constitutions of dependencies and territories. (Oceana Publications, 1975-)
[English version updated to 2011]

Electronic versions of the constitution are freely available in German, Dutch and French on the Belgian Senate website.  An English version is available on the House of Representatives website.  Consolidated and original texts of the constitution are also available in World Constitutions Illustrated on HeinOnline from our Law Databases page.

Consolidated legislation

The Justel database is a key source of freely available online legislation. It includes full-text consolidated versions of the legislation published in the official gazette, Moniteur belge, from June 1994 (original versions are also available here).

There is no official compilation or official codifications as such. IALS holds the commercially published Les Codes Larcier in print. This is a French-language compilation of Belgian legislation in force. The most recent edition available at IALS is:

Les Codes Larcier. Edition 2016. Tomes I-4.  (Larcier 2016, with supplements for 2017)

 Les Codes Larcier is also available on the commercial database Stradalex, to which IALS does not subscribe.

Chronological legislation

Moniteur belge / Belgisch Staatsblad (Bruxelles, Direction du Moniteur Belge, 1831-)

This is the Belgian official government gazette, which officially publishes laws, regulations and decrees, etc. It is published daily (except on Sundays, Mondays and legal holidays) with French and Dutch parallel texts. It is made available for free via the website of the Federal Justice Department.  IALS has it on microfilm from 1944-1974, 1976-1983 and 1995-2001. 

An alternative source of chronological legislation is the commercial publication, Pasinomie: collection complète des lois, décrets, ordonnances, arrêtés et réglements généraux. Bruxelles, Bruylant, 1788-2015.  IALS Library has holdings of this series in the Library from 1788 onwards to 2015 (incomplete).

There are other sources for session laws, but none are held in the Institute's Library:

• Bulletin legislatif belge (Bruxelles, Maison F. Larcier, 1931-). Published weekly. Contains legislation of general interest promulgated during the preceding week.
• Bulletin usuel des lois et arrêtés (Bruxelles, Bruylant, 1539-). Published bi-monthly. Contains legislation since 1539 in chronological order. However only the more important texts are published in full.
• Omnilegie (Bruges, La Charte, 1952-). Published monthly. A complete collection of key laws and regulations. Of special interest because of parallel texts in French and Dutch allowing comparison of legal terminology in both languages.
• Recueil des lois, décrets et arrêtés / Verzameling der wetten, decreten, besluiten (Bruxelles, La Direction, Moniteur Belge, 1831-). French and Dutch parallel texts. A selective compilation of the more important legislation appearing in the Moniteur belge. Available in the British Library Official Publications Library.

There is no general index published to legislation in force, however, one can subscribe separately to the indexes of the Moniteur belge: Table chronologiques et alphabetiques du Moniteur belge (Bruxelles, Larcier, 1831-). This is published monthly and cumulates through the current year of publication, so subscribers also receive an annual cumulated index.

All treaties that Belgium has signed since 1987 are available on the Foreign Affairs Department's Treaties Database.

There are no official series of law reports in Belgium and the legal profession relies on unofficial sources for court decisions. Pasicrisie belge (Bruxelles, Bruylant, 1791-) is a commercial series which publishes decisions of the Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation). In the past it also included a selection of Appeal cases and lower tribunals. This French-language series is in the Institute Library from 1814 onwards.

Reports on administrative law are published in the collection Recueil des arrêts du Conseil d'Etat (Heule, Editions administratives U.G.A., 1948-1994). This series is also in the Institute Library from 1948-1994.

Court decisions are reported and annotated in commercially published legal periodicals as well, e.g.:

Journal des Tribunaux, 1881-

Rechtskundig Weekblad, 1931-

Revue Critique de Jurisprudence Belge, 1947-

Revue Pratique des Sociétés Civiles et Commerciales, 1889-2015

Tijdschrift voor Privaatrecht, 1964-

All of these titles are in the Library.

A key source of freely available case law on the web is Juportal, a public database of Belgian case law. Juportal includes:

• Judgments of the Cour Constitutionnelle
• A selection of case law from the Court of Cassation
• A very select few decisions from the Le Conseil d'État
• Selected decisions from other courts and tribunals

The websites of several individual courts also contain some case law for that specific court. The Cour Constitutionnelle website contains all full-text case law of the court. The Conseil d'Etat website contains decisions of the court from 1994 onwards.

An important annual digest-index to case law and doctrinal writing available at IALS is:

Recueil permanent des revues juridiques / Permanent overzicht van juridische tijdschriften, 2008- 2014 (which continues the Recueil annuel de jurisprudence belge (Bruxelles, Larcier, 1950-2007))

This is known for short as the RPRJ or POJT, formerly the RAJB. IALS holds it from 1949 - 2014, but lacks volumes for the years 1954, 1960, and 1963-1970 inclusive, but these years are mostly covered by our holding of Répertoire décennal, mentioned next. The RPRJ is available electronically on the Stradalex database (to which IALS does not subscribe).

Répertoire décennal de la jurisprudence belge (Bruxelles, Bruylant, 1880-1980)

This is an important collection of digests of decisions and doctrinal writings in all areas of the law arranged by subject, and including annotations originally published in Pasicrisie belge. The most recent decennial digest is that covering 1966-1975 in eight volumes, published from 1979-1984. The Institute Library has 1956-1965 (8v.) and 1966-1975 (8v.).This series is no longer published.

An encyclopaedic work on Belgian law is:

Les Novelles: Corpus Juris Belgici (Bruxelles Larcier, 1931-)

The IALS holdings of this survey of Belgian law are no longer current and the volumes are kept in the reserve collection. Les Novelles follows the order of the articles in the codes, developing the text as a systematic treatise on each branch of the law. It is published in approximately fifty volumes and maintains a high standard of precise and scholarly information. The Library has many volumes of this series published up to 1985.

The Library's intention is to collect major treatises and other legal works by scholars on all the main areas of Belgian law.  Among recent titles are:

Nicolas Bernard, Le droit des biens : après la réforme 2020 (Limal 2020)

Jean-Pierre Buyle, Actualités en droit commercial et bancaire : liber amicorum Martine Delierneux (Larcier 2018)

Hugues Dumont, Droit constitutionnel : approche critique et interdisciplinaire. Tome 1. L'état. (Larcier 2021) 

Ann Lawrence Durviaux, Principes de droit administrative. Tome 1. L'action publique (Larcier 2018)

Marcel Fontaine, Droit des assurances (Larcier 2016)

Frédéric Georges, Droit judiciaire (vol.1, Larcier Legal 2019)

Yves-Henri Leleu, Droit des personnes et des familles (Larcier 2020)

Jacques Malherbe, Droit des sociétés (Larcier 2020)

David Renders, Le citoyen et l'administration face au juge et au médiateur institutionnel (Larcier 2021)

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The Library has several recent works including the following:

André Alen, David Haljan and Willen Verrijdt,  Constitutional Law in Belgium (Kluwer Law International 2020) (ebook)

Niuscha Bassiri, Arbitration in Belgium: A Practitioner's Guide (Kluwer Law International 2016)

Diederik Bruloot, Belgian and European perspectives on creditor protection in closed companies (Intersentia 2019) (ebook)

Brecht Deseure, Sovereignty, Civic Participation, and Constitutional Law : The People Versus the Nation in Belgium (Routledge, 2021) (ebook)

Patrick Humblet, Introduction to Belgian Labour Law. (Intersentia 2016)

Marc Kruithof, Introduction to Belgian Law (Wolters Kluwer 2017)

Marc Kruithof, Tort Law in Belgium (Kluwer Law International 2018) (ebook)

Herman Nys, Medical Law in Belgium (Kluwer Law International 2021) (ebook)

Piet Taelman, Civil Procedure in Belgium (Kluwer Law International 2018)

Niels Vandezande, When an Original is not Original: the Originality Requirement in Belgian Law (Intersentia 2019)

Belgian law journals

The IALS Library has good coverage of the well-established Belgian law journals. The dates in brackets correspond to the library holdings:

Annales de Droit de Louvain, Revue Trimestrielle de Droit Belge (1965-)

Annales de la Faculté de Droit de Liège (1959-1982)

Journal des Tribunaux (1960-)

Rechtskundig Weekblad (1931- )

Revue Critique de Jurisprudence Belge (1947-)

Revue de Droit Militaire et de Droit de la Guerre (1962-1997)

Revue de Droit Pénal et de Criminologie (1960-)

Revue de la Faculté de droit de l'Université de Liège (1959-)

Tijdschrift voor Privaatrecht (1964-)

The Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (available via the subscription database HeinOnline) indexes articles from a wide of Belgian law journals, including those listed above.

Journal abbreviations

A list of Belgian legal journal abbreviations is maintained on KU Leuven's website.

Useful starting points to sources of Belgian legal information include:

Verbeke C F, 'Belgium' in Winterton J and Moys E. Information sources in law (eds) (2nd edn, Bowker Saur 1997)

Malliet C, Research guide to Belgian law, published on the Globalex website, April 2017

The Belgium section of WorldLII allows the browsing and searching of selected sites containing Belgian primary legal materials.