The present reporter has been associated with the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) from its inception in 1959, first as Assistant Editor and, for the last five years, als General Editor; his remarks will be confined to matters of which he has had direct experience in his work for the IFLP.

The basic need for unification and clarification of technical terminology is probably to be met with in all branches of learning. The lawyers might form an exception to this since legal science by its very nature is, to a very large extent, a conceptual science. It is worth while, nevertheless, to examine the question whether a uniform legal thesaurus for the legal systems in the area in which German is spoken is necessary; that is to say, a thesaurus which could, among other things, contribute to a unification of legal terminology. The following report should not be understood as a contribution to the basic problems of a thesaurus as a documentation language of a special kind. Those considerations and questions will, however, be briefly examined which could arise in connection with the compilation and development of a special legal thesaurus.

After some first impulses had been received from learned writers, preparatory work for the use of electronic data processing (EDP) in overcoming the difficulties in obtaining information in the legal system was taken up in the Federal Ministry of Justice as early as in 1967.