Information about Lovdata in English

Terms of use

The website Lovdata.no provides access to a collection of online legal resources.

Some of the legal documents are available free of charge to all non-subscribers; and such documents may be used on a personal basis as long as such use is for a non-profit and/or non-commercial purpose.

Any use, distribution and/or re-packaging of said documents for resale, educational purposes etc. requires a separate agreement with Lovdata – see below for further details and conditions.

Mass downloading is not allowed. You will find an English translation of the original User Agreement at the end of this article.

Norwegian legislation in English

The Lovdata Foundation provides a collection of Norwegian legislation in English.

The texts are not translated by the Lovdata Foundation. The translations are provided by ministries and other public authorities.

The translations are not official; they are provided for information purposes only. In the event of any inconsistency, the Norwegian version shall prevail

The Law Library at the University of Oslo maintains a collection of links to translated Norwegian legislation (also translations languages other than English). The collection includes links to the legislation available at Lovdata. 

The Lovdata Foundation

Background

The establishing of Lovdata

Lovdata was established as a private foundation on 1 July 1981 by the Ministry of Justice and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. Some of the background material leading up to the creation of Lovdata is collected in The Lawdata Papers, published in 1981.

Purpose

The purpose of Lovdata is to establish and operate legal information systems on a non-profit basis.

Activities

Lovdata's main activities are:

  • The operation of a website with legal information
  • The operation of an online legal information service
  • Publication of Norsk Lovtidend (The Official Legal Gazette)
  • The production of:
    • the text for Norges Lover (Norwegian statutes in force)
    • overenskomster med fremmede stater (Norwegian Treaty Register)
    • many other publications containing acts, regulations and other legislation.
  • Development of software in connection with maintaining and running large databases.
  • Consultancy services in informatics.

Lovdata is also the publisher of the following Scandinavian and Norwegian periodicals:

  • Lov&Data, a publication for legal informatics edited by Jarle Roar Sæbø, Country Counsel Norway and Denmark at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (published quarterly).
  • EuroRett, a publication highlighting legal development within the European Union (appr. 20 issues a year).

Web systems

In May 1995, Lovdata launched a website with the purpose of making legal information available on a broader basis than earlier. In addition to Lovdata’s traditional subscription-based databases, the following information was made available to the general public free of charge:

The Official Legal Gazette

New acts and regulations are published in the Gazette . At the present time the digital issues go back to 1980 (launched May 1995).

Acts in force

All acts in force are continually consolidated and include a table of contents showing the chapters and sections. Acts can be found by searching or browsing the chronological or alphabetical indexes (launched May 1997).

Regulations

All national and local regulations in force are continually consolidated. An index to chapters and sections is generated for each regulation.

The national regulations (i.e. regulations applying to Norway as a whole) are grouped according to responsible ministry. Within each ministry, regulations may be found in the same way as for statutes: text search or the chronological and alphabetical indexes.
(Launched March 1998)

Local regulations are primarily grouped according to the municipality or county in which they apply. In addition, there are categories corresponding to national parks, wildlife areas and so on. For each municipality or geographical category a chronological and alphabetical index is available (launched March 1998).

Supreme Court decisions

New decisions are made available soon after they are handed down. Decisions from 2008 are available at our publicly accessible website. Hyperlinks to statutes (including chapter/section) are automatically generated (launched May 1997).

Summaries of the decisions are available dating back to 2008. 

Appellate Court decisions

A selection of new decisions from the six Norwegian appellate courts are available from 2008 onwards. Hyperlinks to statutes (including chapter/section) are generated automatically (launched August 1999).

District Court Decisions

Selected decisions from district courts are made available. These decisions remain available for one year.

European Court of Human Rights

From January 2006 Lovdata has cooperated with The Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the University of Oslo. The Centre writes Norwegian summaries of the Court’s category 1 cases. These summaries are published on Lovdata’s open site along with a link to the case itself (launched 2006).

The Norwegian Treaty Register

The treaty register gives information about bilateral and multilateral conventions which Norway is a part of. Lovdata administers the register on behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is publicly accessible through www.lovdata.no.

Lovdata Pro subscription system

Lovdata Pro

The Lovdata Pro system is Lovdata’s application for professional users and covers the Norwegian primary legal resources.

Legislation

  • All statutes since 1687 now in force and all historical versions since 1998.
  • All regulations in force, national and local. Historical versions of all regulations from 1998.
  • The circulars of the tax and social security authorities.
  • The Norwegian Legal Gazette from 1986.
  • Travaux prépatoires – preparatory works.
    • NOU – Official Norwegian reports, from about 1990
    • Ot.prp./Prop – bill drafts from about 1985, Proposals before the Parliament from 1991
  • Treaties signed by Norway since 1992

Decisions

  • Supreme court decisions from 1836
  • All appellate court decisions from 1993. Selected decisions from 1870.
  • Selected decisions on a regular basis from Oslo District Court from 2002 and from other district courts (lower courts) from 2004. In addition selected lower court decisions from about 1880.
  • Nordic court decisions concerning maritime law from 1952.
  • Court decisions on all levels concerning employment contracts.
  • Decisions by the Labour court from 1916.
  • Social security court decisions from 1989.
  • Opinions by the Parliamentary Ombudsman (from 1963).
  • Opinions by special boards dealing with complaints from private customers of banks and insurance companies.
  • Opinions of the Market Council.
  • The opinions of about 40 different governmental and other appeal boards.

Literature

  • More than 8,000 legal articles published in the main legal journals in Norway.
  • Bibliographic references to legal literature.
  • The publishers of several major legal books, Universitetsforlaget and Arbeidsretten, both have bilateral agreements with Lovdata that enable links between our systems for mutual subscribers.
  • Judicial comments based on a sort of Wiki principle.

Citation jumps between the different databases are implemented.

  • The Norwegian version of the EEA agreement
  • The Norwegian translations of legislation relevant to the EEA
  • The English version of the Celex database implemented on our system
  • The Lovdata database

Citation jumps between Eurlex and Lovdata are implemented as well as citation jumps between the Eurlex databases.

Updates and pricing

Content updates

All databases are continuously updated. The number of databases are steadily increasing.

Pricing

For a list of subscription prices, see https://pro.lovdata.no (in Norwegian).

Access from abroad

Both the user interface and the documents in the databases are in Norwegian, a language you therefore have to understand fairly well if you want to access our online databases. Outside of the language barrier, there is nothing preventing users from abroad from subscribing to Lovdata Pro. At present we have foreign subscribers in all Nordic countries as well as in continental Europe.

English translation of the original Norwegian User Agreement.

Terms of use of documents from Lovdata's open site lovdata.no

§ 1.

Utilization for the purpose og publishing, distribution, database usage or training activities of documents obtained from Lovdata, including but not limited to, statutes , regulations, circulars, decisions etc., requires a separate agreement. Lovdata will decide, in case of doubt, what is meant by publishing, distribution, database usage or training activities stated above.

Any resale of Lovdata services requires a separate agreement.

§ 2.

Linking to Lovdata’s site is allowed and encouraged. The pages must, however, be presented to the user in their original form. It is not permitted to process, modify or edit the pages before they are passed on to the user, unless otherwise agreed.

§ 3.

Lovdata is not responsible for any errors in the documents. Should the user become aware of any errors, a notice should be sent to Lovdata at the user`s earliest convenience. Lovdata cannot be held responsible for any consequence of downtime, restrictions on the availability of lovdata.no or other system errors.

§ 4.

Lovdata does not allow indexing or mass downloading from its website, with or without automated methods.