Hawaii Code

What Hawaii Code MCP server does

The Hawaii Code MCP server gives MCP clients access to the Hawaii Revised Statutes (HRS). It supports two main workflows: retrieving a statute by citation and finding statutes through the official catchlines used by the Hawaii Legislature. The Hawaii Code MCP server is listed in the Legal category and is intended for applications that need structured access to Hawaii state statutes.

A citation lookup can return the section’s current text, official catchline, chapter context, and amendment or enactment history. Historical retrieval is available for years from 1999 through 2025, allowing an application to request the archived version of the same section for a selected year.

How it works

The source website stores HRS content as separate HTML files organized by volume, chapter, and section. An index is built from each chapter’s table of contents. That index contains citations and official catchlines, but not the body text of the statutes.

hi_search searches the baked index in memory. Its matches are based on official section and chapter catchlines, not unrestricted searches across statutory prose. hi_statute uses the index to identify a chapter, constructs the expected section URL, and retrieves the section page. If the expected filename does not resolve, it can inspect the live directory listing to handle sections with changed, decimal, or letter-suffixed identifiers.

Historical pages use a different archive path and may declare Windows-1252 in the HTML rather than the HTTP response. The implementation detects the page’s declared character set before parsing it. It also distinguishes missing-section pages and block pages from valid statute pages, even when the upstream site returns an HTTP 200 status for a missing citation.

Setup and configuration

The Hawaii Code MCP server is keyless and does not require an API key or other authentication setting. The provided material does not specify client-specific configuration or required environment variables.

The citation and catchline index is generated ahead of time. Maintainers can rebuild it with the repository’s bake-index.mjs script after Hawaii recodifies its statutes, typically following an annual legislative session. The script accepts a relay URL when the network running the bake is blocked by the Legislature site’s WAF. The production gateway can fetch the source directly according to the repository notes.

Tools and capabilities

• hi_statute(citation, year?) retrieves a full HRS section by citation. The optional year selects an archived version from 1999–2025 instead of the current text.
• hi_search(query, limit?) searches official chapter and section catchlines and returns matching citations.
• Citation results include the official catchline, chapter context, and inline amendment or enactment history when present.
• Topic searches can find relevant official headings, but they do not search every word in the statutory body.

Limitations and notes

Search coverage is limited to the Legislature’s official catchlines and chapter titles. A query that depends on wording found only inside a statute’s body may not return that section.

The upstream pages can block ordinary laptop or office traffic with Cloudflare, while the live gateway’s Cloudflare Worker access path succeeds. A local index bake may therefore need the documented passthrough Worker relay, depending on the network. The repository describes the integration as independent and unofficial; it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the Hawaii Legislature.

Archived content is available only for the years documented by the source, 1999 through 2025. Requests for nonexistent citations must be handled as lookup failures rather than inferred from an HTTP status alone, because the upstream site may return a custom missing-page response with status 200.