German Legal MCP README

German Legal MCP Server

German, Austrian & EU legal research — legislation, case law, parliamentary materials, literature and standards

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for German, Austrian and EU legal research, providing unified access to legislation, case law, parliamentary materials, literature, preprints and technical standards.

The provider layer is also available as typed application components. Consumers do not need to run MCP or parse tool output — they can consume normalized federal and Länder case law directly:

import {
  CaseLawClient,
} from '@metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp/components/case-law';

const client = new CaseLawClient();
const page = await client.search({
  query: 'DSGVO Schadensersatz',
  resourceTypes: ['case-law'],
  jurisdictions: ['DE', 'DE-NW'],
  limit: 25,
});

Legislation uses the same application-facing model:

import {
  LegislationClient,
} from '@metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp/components/legislation';

const legislation = new LegislationClient();
const laws = await legislation.search({
  query: 'Datenschutzgesetz',
  resourceTypes: ['legislation'],
  jurisdictions: ['DE-NW'],
});

Shared provenance, rights, search and document types are exported from @metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp/contracts. Every provider has a component entry and a structured data client. The MCP tools use those same clients; MCP output is only a presentation layer over the application contract.

Multi-domain databases return discriminated unions. For example, RIS exposes one client for Austrian case law and legislation; narrow each result through resourceType before using type-specific fields:

import { component as ris } from '@metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp/components/ris';

const client = ris.createDataClient();
const results = await client.search({ query: 'Datenschutz' });
for (const result of results.results) {
  if (result.resourceType === 'case-law') console.log(result.fileNumber);
  if (result.resourceType === 'legislation') console.log(result.eli);
}

Optional portable capabilities cover tables of contents, authentication and operational status. RIS exposes native legislation TOCs. The German legislation client reports a native TOC where the source supplies one and derives it from the document otherwise. RII is case-law-only and does not advertise a TOC capability. Nautos implements TOC and authentication lifecycle capabilities while keeping its session details behind the provider boundary.

Supported Sources

Features

Bundes- & Landesrecht (legis_* tools)

• Federal and state legislation — BUND (all federal laws) + 16 Länder (all states)
• No authentication — free public access; the client defines no explicit request limit
• Unified interface — one set of tools for all jurisdictions
• Full text search — search across state legislation (Länder only)
• Resilient input — BUND accepts "§ 823", "823", "Art. 1", "Paragraph 51"
• Pandoc-compatible Markdown — clean conversion with Turndown
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution
• Available states: BUND, BB, BW, BY, BE, HB, HE, HH, MV, NI, NW, RP, SL, SN, ST, SH, TH

Rechtsprechung im Internet (rii_* tools)

• Federal court decisions — BVerfG, BGH, BVerwG, BFH, BAG, BSG, BPatG (from 2010)
• Bavarian state courts — AG, LG, OLG, VG, VGH, FG, ArbG, LAG, BayVerfGH via gesetze-bayern.de
• NRW state courts — decisions from the official NRWE database via source: "NW"
• Lower Saxony state courts — decisions from NI-VORIS via source: "NI"
• Brandenburg state courts — decisions from the official Brandenburg decision database via source: "BB"
• Bremen state courts — official Bremen VG archive via source: "HB"; the Bremen index links separate OLG/OVG/VG/LAG portals, so coverage is explicitly partial until those portals expose a common search interface
• Saxony state courts — ESAMOSplus WebForms search for the OLG Dresden archive via source: "SN"
• jPortal state courts — Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein and Thüringen via their official jPortal portals
• Shared DecisionAdapter contract — all new state sources normalize IDs, court, date, file number, ECLI, snippets and Markdown retrieval behind the same rii_* tools
• Cross-portal search — source: "ALL" searches every configured decision portal in parallel, deduplicates overlapping decisions, ranks the consolidated result list and reports unavailable portals
• No authentication — free public access
• Full text search — search across all federal court decisions
• Kurztext/Langtext — summary or full text via part parameter
• Randnummern — formatted as [Rn. 5]{.rn} (pandoc spans)
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

RIS Österreich (ris_* tools)

• Austrian federal, state & case law — broad Bundesrecht and Landesrecht collection search, plus Judikatur (OGH/OLG/LG via Justiz; VwGH, VfGH, BVwG and others via the court filter)
  • Collection semantics: ris_search can return consolidated norms (BrKons/LrKons) and authentic gazette publications; the returned applikation identifies the result type. A bundesland filter restricts Landesrecht to that state's consolidated law (LrKons). For state case law use application="judikatur" with the appropriate court (e.g. Lvwg), not bundesland.
• Normalized application client — RisDataClient.search() restricts legislation results to consolidated law and supports all 9 Bundesländer through normalized jurisdictions
• No authentication — free public Open Government Data REST API (data.bka.gv.at/ris/api/v2.6)
• Latest-first — sort="date" for the newest decisions; Judikatur Rechtssätze link their full decision text (Entscheidungstext) for ris_get
• Navigate & read statutes — ris_toc law="ABGB" lists the §§ with headings; ris_get_norm law="ABGB" paragraph="1295" returns a single §
• Surgical retrieval — ris_get section=… returns only a Randnummer (Rn 5), an Rn range (Rn 5-9), a line range (lines:1-40), or a heading (Spruch) — all token-preserving
• Pandoc-compatible Markdown — Randnummern as [Rn. 5]{.rn} spans; document HTML converted with Cheerio + Turndown
• Structured metadata — Geschäftszahl, Entscheidungsdatum, ECLI, issuing court/organ
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution
• ⚠️ Austrian law — for German case law use rii_*, for German legislation use legis_*

InfoCuria — CJEU (icu_* tools)

• EU Court of Justice case law — judgments, opinions, orders from CJEU and General Court
• No authentication — free public access via InfoCuria API
• Multilingual — documents available in all EU languages (default: DE)
• Flexible case lookup — accepts case numbers (C-476/17), CELEX numbers, or internal IDs
• Randnummern — formatted as [Rn. 5]{.rn}
• Partial content — section parameter for Rn ranges, headings, or line ranges
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

EUR-Lex (eul_* tools)

• EU legislation — directives, regulations, decisions, treaties (TFEU, TEU)
• No authentication — free public access via Cellar REST API and SPARQL
• Multilingual — documents available in all EU languages (default: DE)
• CELEX lookup — retrieve by CELEX number (e.g., "32016R0679" for GDPR)
• SPARQL search — search by title keywords, filter by resource type
• Partial content — section parameter for articles (Art. 5), headings, or line ranges
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

DIP Bundestag (dip_* tools)

• Parliamentary documents — Bundestagsdrucksachen (Gesetzentwürfe, Beschlussempfehlungen, Anfragen)
• Legislative processes — Vorgänge with status tracking and linked documents
• Debate transcripts — full text search across Plenarprotokolle (BT and BR)
• Full text retrieval — extracted text including Gesetzesbegründungen, with section support
• Public API key included — works out of the box (key valid until end of May 2027, override via env var)
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

arXiv (arxiv_* tools)

• Preprint search — search by keywords, author, title, abstract, or category
• Metadata + abstract — default response without full text fetch (token-efficient)
• HTML full text — Markdown conversion for papers from ~2024+ (LaTeXML HTML)
• PDF fallback — older papers without HTML return abstract + PDF link
• No authentication — free public API; the client defines no explicit request limit (upstream usage policies still apply)
• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

nautos.de (nautos_* tools)

• DIN/EN/ISO standards — search and retrieve technical standards from nautos.de
• Two-phase document retrieval — outline (metadata + TOC) first, then sections on demand
• Automatic authentication — IP-based login (auto-detected), user-based login fallback
• Structured TOC — hierarchical table of contents with section IDs for navigation
• Identity-scoped file cache — 30-day TTL, persistent across restarts under <GLMCP_STATE_DIR>/cache/nautos/identities/
• Save to file — save_path parameter to dump full document to disk

Install in Claude Desktop (one-click bundle)

The easiest way to use this server in Claude Desktop is the packaged MCP Bundle (.mcpb) — no Node.js, no npx, no config file.

1. Download german-legal-mcp.mcpb from the latest release.
2. In Claude Desktop open Settings → Extensions and drag the .mcpb onto the window (or use Install…).
3. Optionally set the DIP key or nautos credentials in the extension's settings — everything else works out of the box.

The bundle ships the public, no-authentication sources and is cross-platform (macOS and Windows, Apple Silicon and Intel) — Claude Desktop supplies the Node.js runtime, so a single download works everywhere.

Quick Start with npx

npx @metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp

or add your MCP client config (e.g., claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "german-legal": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Environment Variables

Provider Enablement

nautos.de Configuration

Authentication: IP-based login is tried first (requires GLMCP_NAUTOS_TENANT_KEY). If it fails and credentials are set, user-based login is attempted as fallback.

Tools

Bundes- & Landesrecht

Rechtsprechung im Internet

RIS Österreich

InfoCuria — CJEU

EUR-Lex

DIP Bundestag

arXiv

nautos.de

Token-Efficient Document Retrieval

Retrieval behavior is explicit and provider-specific:

1. Outline-first — Nautos returns metadata and a table of contents before sections or full-file output are requested.
2. Focused reads — tools that advertise section accept the selectors documented in their tool description, such as Randnummer, heading, line or article ranges. Selector formats are not assumed across every provider.
3. File output — every tool that advertises save_path requires an absolute path inside GLMCP_EXPORT_DIR. Existing targets, symbolic-link parents and paths outside that root are refused; successful writes create private directories/files. If that tool also supports section, it writes the requested section rather than the complete document.

Other retrieval tools return their documented direct response; for example, arXiv returns metadata and the abstract by default. They are not implicitly converted to the outline-first flow.

Markdown Output

Documents are converted to pandoc-compatible Markdown:

• Randnummern: [Rn. 5]{.rn} (bracketed spans)
• Footnotes: ^[inline footnote text] (pandoc inline footnotes)

Development

npm test              # Run tests
npm run test:watch    # Watch mode
npm run test:coverage # Coverage report
npm run verify        # Complete deterministic release gate

Live provider contracts

The default suite never uses the network. Opt-in live contracts validate the current upstream response through the same normalized data clients consumed by applications:

npm run test:live:public

This runs search → normalized reference → document for the public providers and for every configured German case-law and legislation source. TOC-capable legislation sources are checked as well. Gesetze im Internet is the documented exception: it has no search API, so the live contract retrieves bgb/823 directly and validates the BGB TOC separately.

Live output contains only source, document identifier, title, resource type and content length. Full text is asserted in memory and is never written as a test report or CI artifact.

MCP Inspector

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/bin/german-legal-mcp.js

Commit Convention

This repo uses Conventional Commits enforced via Husky + commitlint.

Types: feat, fix, docs, style, refactor, perf, test, chore, ci, build, revert

Scopes: legis, rii, ris, icu, eul, dip, nautos, core, deps, config

Architecture

• Manifest-driven providers — startup, help, shutdown and public/private distribution use one checked provider manifest

• Cheerio + Turndown for HTML → pandoc Markdown conversion

• Zod for input validation

• Axios for HTTP requests (Legis, RII, RIS, InfoCuria, EUR-Lex, DIP, arXiv, nautos)

• Structured JSON errors — all providers return BaseError.toJSON() with code, userMessage, recoveryHint; Axios errors auto-wrapped; DNS failures fail fast

• Conversion validation — all HTML→Markdown providers validate output is non-empty; detects upstream layout changes early

• Tools namespaced by source (legis_, rii_, ris_, icu_, eul_, dip_, arxiv_, nautos_)

License

GPL-3.0 - See LICENSE for details.