# Uk Caselaw

**Category:** ⚖️ Legal  
**Repository:** https://github.com/pipeworx-io/mcp-uk-caselaw  
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**Installs:** 0  
**Upvotes:** 0  
**Directory Page:** https://allmcps.com/mcp/uk-caselaw

## Description
UK case law — Find Case Law, The National Archives.

## Claude Desktop Quick Installation
Heuristic fallback — verify the package name and runner against the repository README before running it. Uses `npx` (confidence: low):

```json
"mcpServers": {
  "uk-caselaw": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["-y","uk-caselaw"]
  }
}
```

## Documentation & README

# UK Case Law — Find Case Law

Judgments and tribunal decisions of the UK courts, from The National Archives'
Find Case Law service: the Supreme Court, Privy Council, Court of Appeal, High
Court, Court of Protection, Family Court, the Upper and First-tier Tribunals and
the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

Part of [Pipeworx](https://pipeworx.io) — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1684+ live data sources.

Search by subject, party or judge, then read the **full text** of any judgment
from its neutral citation — so a quoted passage or a cited authority can be
checked against what the court actually wrote.

This is UK law only. US case law is a separate corpus served by `court-listener`
(`search_case_law`, `find_case`, `get_opinion`); an American authority returned
for a UK question is a wrong answer, not a near miss.

## This is not all UK law

Find Case Law is a real but partial corpus. A 0-row result means *not found
here*, never *no such case*:

- **No Crown Court, County Court or Magistrates' Court judgments.** Most of
  what those courts decide is given orally and never transcribed, so Find Case
  Law structurally cannot hold it.
- **No dockets, pleadings or filings.** This is judgments only — there is no
  UK equivalent of PACER here.
- **Scotland and Northern Ireland's own court systems are not covered.** Only
  England & Wales courts and the UK-wide apex courts/tribunals (Supreme Court,
  Privy Council, Employment Appeal Tribunal, Upper Tribunal) are indexed. A
  case that also went through the Court of Session or a Scottish/NI appeal may
  still appear here only for its UK-level leg.
- **The Employment Appeal Tribunal only — not the first-tier Employment
  Tribunal.** `eat` covers appeals; ET claims before they reach appeal are a
  different, uncovered corpus (see the `uk-tribunals` pack/task).
- **No citator/treatment data.** A judgment comes back as published, with no
  signal on whether it was later overturned, doubted or followed.
- **Coverage is mostly 2001 onward**, comprehensively from 2003 for some
  courts and much later for others (see Caveats below).

## Auth

**None.** No key, no signup. Requests carry a browser User-Agent because the
service rejects a bare fetch signature.

## Tools

| Tool | Use it when |
|---|---|
| `search_uk_caselaw` | You know the **subject, party or judge** — "unjust enrichment", "Tesco" |
| `get_uk_judgment` | You have a **neutral citation** — `[2023] UKSC 42` — and want the text |
| `list_uk_courts` | You want to narrow by court and need the code |

The usual path is `search_uk_caselaw` → take the `neutral_citation` or
`identifier` → `get_uk_judgment`.

## Neutral citations

A neutral citation maps onto a Find Case Law path by rule — `[2026] EWHC 1996
(Comm)` is `ewhc/comm/2026/1996`, `[2023] UKSC 42` is `uksc/2023/42`. The rule is
a good first guess, so `get_uk_judgment` tries it and falls back to searching the
citation text when the derived path 404s, reporting which route resolved it in
`resolved_by`. Either form is accepted as input.

## Data sources

- Search: `https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/atom.xml` (Atom feed)
- Judgment text: `https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/<identifier>/data.xml`
  ([Akoma Ntoso](http://www.akomantoso.org/) XML)
- Service: <https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/>

Judgments are Crown copyright, published under the
[Open Justice Licence](https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/open-justice-licence).

**Licence note.** The Open Justice Licence covers per-query pass-through — a
caller searches, we relay the matching judgments back — but it explicitly
excludes "computational analysis": bulk programmatic extraction or
mirroring/indexing the corpus requires a separate licence Pipeworx does not
hold. This pack is not, and must not become, a mirror of Find Case Law.

## Caveats worth passing to a user

- **Coverage starts recently.** Find Case Law holds judgments the courts
  published to it — comprehensively from 2003 for some courts and much later for
  others. A missing older authority means *not held here*, not *no such case*.
  For historic authority a law-report subscription is still the answer.
- **An unrecognised court code is rejected before any request goes upstream**,
  as an `invalid_arguments` error naming the bad code and the full valid list
  (call `list_uk_courts` to get it fresh). Codes look like `uksc`, `ewca/civ`,
  `ewhc/comm` and cannot be guessed from a court's name — and the Employment
  Appeal Tribunal's code is `eat`, not the "ukeat" its name would suggest
  (fixed 2026-09-18; every code in `list_uk_courts` is now one that has been
  probed live against the atom feed and confirmed to return entries).
- **Search is over the judgment text**, so a phrase the court would actually
  write finds more than a legal concept it never names.
- **Judgments are long** — 140k–450k characters is ordinary. `get_uk_judgment`
  bounds the response with `max_chars` and sets `truncated` so a cut-off text is
  never mistaken for the whole judgment.
- **Only `newest`, `oldest` and `relevance` sort.** Upstream answers an
  unrecognised sort with an empty feed, which would read as "no such cases", so
  the pack rejects one instead of passing it through.

## Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-caselaw": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-caselaw/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

### What this endpoint actually serves

`tools/list` at `https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-caselaw/mcp` returns the tools in the table
above **plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools** — `ask_pipeworx`,
`discover_tools`, `search_within`, `remember`/`recall` and the rest of the
gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a
single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the
pack's own. The connection's `initialize` response states its exact scope, and
is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a
scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via
`ask_pipeworx`, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a
second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without
them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth,
connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed
directly, instead of just this one's:

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1684+ data sources. The
only difference is which pack's tools are listed **directly**; `ask_pipeworx`
reaches all of them from either one.

## No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

```bash
curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_uk_caselaw \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"unjust enrichment","court":"uksc","limit":3}'
```

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: `GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_uk_caselaw`. Find one: `POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs` with `{"query":"..."}`.

## Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no
gateway round-trip:

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-caselaw": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-uk-caselaw"]
    }
  }
}
```

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

```bash
npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-uk-caselaw
```

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers `initialize`/`tools/list`/`tools/call`
for **only** this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway
connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

## Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English —
this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

```
ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Uk Caselaw data" })
```

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

## More

- [Docs and guides](https://pipeworx.io/docs)
- [pipeworx.io](https://pipeworx.io)

## License

MIT