By decision of December 4, 1946, the "Fontes iuris" were founded as an edition series for sources on Austrian legal history. They form the third section of the "Fontes rerum Austriacarum" and were published by the Savigny Commission until 1995 and since then by the KRGÖ, since 2012/17 in conjunction with the Legal Sources Research Center of the University of Vienna.
The series has so far published legal sources on the history of various Austrian cities (Eferding, Feldkirch, Krems, Leoben, Linz, Rust, Stein, Tulln and Vienna), factory privileges, craft regulations and craftsmen's contracts, as well as urbaria, forest regulations and other sources on the history of Austrian manorial estates (recently: legal sources on the Klosterneuburg manorial estate).
A major project within the "Fontes iuris" is the edition of the Vienna city registers, of which five partial volumes have been published since 1989 (partial volume 6 in preparation); following this model, the Pressburg Protocollum Testamentorum has also been edited since 2010 (partial volume 3 in preparation).
With the oldest materials on the history of the Austrian General Civil Code (ABGB), edited in 2012, the "Fontes iuris" ventured for the first time into sources of pan-Austrian, even European significance. Another innovation was that it was not a norm that was edited, but rather materials relating to it. Two further volumes on this area are currently in preparation.
A volume on the Tyrolean provincial ordinances, published in 2018, contains key sources on the history of Tyrolean constitutional, private and procedural law in the early modern period.