Arkansas Opinions README

@pipeworx/arkansas-opinions

Current Arkansas Supreme Court and Arkansas Court of Appeals opinions — neutral citation, case name, decision date, docket, author, disposition, full text and every published revision — from the Arkansas Judiciary's official opinions archive, decisions from 2026-01-01 on, collected hourly. Fleet #2924.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1784+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

It exists because CourtListener, the source behind the court-listener pack, runs months behind the Arkansas courts: on 2026-10-10 its newest Arkansas Supreme Court opinion was 2026 Ark. 114 (2026-06-11) while the court had issued through 2026 Ark. 144 (2026-10-08). Older Arkansas case law stays with court-listener; its lookup_citation now falls through to this pack for a YYYY Ark. N / YYYY Ark. App. N citation CourtListener does not have.

Tools

• ark_recent_opinions(court?, since?, limit?, include_syllabi?) — newest opinions first, for one court ("supreme", "appeals") or both, optionally since a date. Answers "what did the Arkansas Supreme Court decide this week".
• ark_opinion(citation | item_id, version?, max_chars?) — one opinion by neutral citation ("2026 Ark. 140", "2026 Ark. App. 449", spelling is forgiving) or archive item id: metadata, full text, citation status and the version history. version returns an earlier revision's text.
• ark_search_opinions(query, court?, date_after?, date_before?, limit?) — full-text search (SQLite FTS5, porter stemming) over case name, citation and opinion text, with a highlighted passage per hit. Quote a phrase for an exact match; when no opinion holds every word it retries with any word and says so (matched: "any_term").
• ark_coverage() — per court: opinion count, earliest and latest decision, lowest/highest citation number per year, how many opinions were revised after release, when collection last succeeded and the state of the backfill. Call it before treating an absence as meaningful.

Every response carries source ("Arkansas Judiciary, official opinions archive") and data_as_of (when the collector last finished a successful run). Each opinion also carries source_url, the opinion's own page on the court's site, so the text can be checked against the original.

Versions

Slip opinions get editorial corrections after release, and the archive flags them as updated. The collector re-reads a flagged opinion; when its text or metadata hash differs from the current version, the new text becomes the current version and the earlier one is kept. ark_opinion lists every version with its retrieval time, SHA-256, length and reason (first_fetch, source_updated). A re-read that changes nothing adds no version.

Citation status

Recorded only from what the source states, on every opinion as citation_status + citation_status_note:

• neutral_citation_assigned — the court assigned a neutral citation and the text carries no "not designated for publication" marker. Nothing more is claimed; the source does not state precedential status beyond that.
• unpublished — the text says it is not designated for publication. Treat it as citation-restricted and never as precedent.
• no_citation_assigned — a syllabus, order or notice with no citation.
• not_yet_read — listed by the court, text not read yet (usually within the hour); not to be cited until it is.

Auth

Keyless for callers. The tools answer only through the Pipeworx gateway: the opinions are read from a database the collector fills, and a standalone npm install has no data, so every tool throws a clear "not bound in this runtime" error there instead of returning an empty list.

Data sources

• Arkansas Judiciary, official opinions archive — Arkansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals opinions with their metadata (court, date, neutral citation, docket, author, opinion type, county, term, disposition, concurring and dissenting judges) and full text. Checked hourly; decisions from 2026-01-01 on.

Opinions of the Arkansas courts are government works and public domain.

Notes for the next person:

• The archive applies a bot check that varies by source IP. The same honest User-Agent was challenged from a laptop and answered from Cloudflare's network on 2026-10-10, which is why the collector runs as a Cloudflare Worker cron. It never solves a challenge and never changes identity; a challenge stops the run and shows as captcha_wall in ark_coverage().last_collection_attempt. How the collector reads the archive is documented in workers/ark-opinions-collector.
• Opinions decided before 2026-01-01 that the archive re-releases are left to court-listener.
• Each court also publishes a daily syllabus document and, for the Court of Appeals, "no opinion" notices. They are kept as document_kind: "syllabus" / "no_opinion_notice" and left out of ark_recent_opinions unless include_syllabi: true.
• Store: Cloudflare D1 database pipeworx-ark-opinions, bound to the gateway as ARK_OPINIONS_DB (d1Binding in pack-manifest.json). Schema: workers/ark-opinions-collector/src/schema.ts.

Quick Start

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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arkansas-opinions": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/arkansas-opinions/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/arkansas-opinions/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:

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

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1784+ 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

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ark_recent_opinions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"court":"supreme","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ark_recent_opinions. 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:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arkansas-opinions": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-arkansas-opinions"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-arkansas-opinions

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 Arkansas Opinions data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT