Australian Law MCP

What australian-law-mcp does

The australian-law-mcp MCP server connects an MCP client to the Federal Register of Legislation, the Commonwealth register for Australian federal legislation. It can locate Acts and legislative instruments, retrieve their text, inspect historical versions, and search across the body of registered titles.

Its point-in-time support is intended for questions where the applicable law may differ from the current compilation. A request can target a date and, where relevant, a section or schedule. This is useful for historical tax, migration, contract, regulatory, and court-related research. The server covers Commonwealth legislation only; it does not provide state legislation, case law, or ATO rulings.

How it works

Responses are obtained live from the register API rather than from a bundled legal database. The register provides compilations with in-force periods, allowing historical requests to use the version associated with the requested date. Current text can be returned as a table of provisions, a selected section, or paginated full text. Schedules can also be addressed directly.

Citation checking extracts statutory references from supplied text and checks them against the register. It can report whether a title exists, whether it is in force, and whether a cited provision exists. Network or upstream failures are represented as unverified results, rather than being treated as proof that a law or section is absent. Older scanned material is accepted only when its recovered section numbering is coherent.

Setup and configuration

The server requires Node.js 20 or newer. A stdio MCP client can launch it with npx -y australian-law-mcp, so no separate package installation or API key is required. Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other stdio clients can use the same command-and-arguments configuration.

A Dockerfile is included for environments that should not install Node on the host. The container must remain attached to standard input because the MCP transport uses stdio; the documented pattern builds the image and runs it interactively with automatic cleanup.

The australian-law-mcp MCP server does not document required environment variables or additional configuration files.

Tools and capabilities

• search_law finds Acts and instruments by name and returns title identifiers for other requests.
• get_law_text retrieves the current compilation, provisions, sections, schedules, or paginated full text.
• get_law_as_at retrieves the version applicable on a supplied historical date.
• verify_citations checks statute references and separates missing provisions from unverified upstream results.
• get_amendment_status reports force or repeal status, incorporated amendments, unincorporated commenced amendments, and amending legislation.
• compare_versions identifies changes between dates or produces a section-level line diff.
• search_full_text performs relevance-ranked searches across title text.
• check_frl_health checks whether the register API is responding, helping diagnose failures in other operations.

Limitations and notes

This tool is limited to Commonwealth legislation. It is not a case-law search service, does not access state registers, and does not provide ATO rulings. The register is the authorised source for the reproduced legislation, and responses include its required attribution. The project is independent of the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and the Australian Government. Its output is legal information rather than legal advice; users should rely on the authorised register publication when a definitive version is required.

The code is MIT-licensed, while legislative content from the register is supplied under CC BY 4.0.