Mississippi Code README

@pipeworx/mississippi-code

Mississippi Code of 1972 (Annotated) — section lookup by citation, chapter browsing by title, and topic/keyword search over official catchlines. Fleet #2883. Keyless.

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.

Tools

• ms_code_section(citation) — the text of a section by citation ("97-3-19", "Miss. Code Ann. § 89-8-19", "Section 97-3-19"). Returns the catchline, the operative statutory text, the HISTORY: line, and Joint Legislative Committee / Amendment / Cross-Reference notes when present, AND a later_acts overlay — every act this pack's own crawl of Mississippi's signed-bill text shows touching this exact citation since the 2020-07-08 snapshot (fleet #2915, see "The overlay" below). Case-law (JUDICIAL DECISIONS) annotations are deliberately excluded — they can run to hundreds of citations per section and are not what a caller asking "what does this statute say" wants back.
• ms_code_chapters(title) — every chapter heading and number within a title (97 is Crimes, 89 is Real and Personal Property), for browsing when you don't have an exact citation.
• ms_code_search(query, limit?) — topic/keyword search over every section's official CATCHLINE (not full statutory body text — see "Why no full-text search" below). Matches like North Dakota's nd_search: IDF- weighted word overlap over a baked index, not a live upstream call.

Auth

Keyless. No signup, no login, on either side of the call.

Why no full-text search

The official LexisNexis-hosted Code (lexisnexis.com/hottopics/mscode, linked from the Secretary of State's own site) sits behind a Cloudflare managed challenge — confirmed live: every direct request gets a "Just a moment..." interstitial page, HTTP 403, no statute text. The two common free third-party renderings, law.justia.com and codes.findlaw.com, sit behind the exact same Cloudflare challenge (confirmed live, identical "Just a moment..." body) — this is not a Lexis-specific wall, it's a Cloudflare bot-check in front of three different vendors' copies of the same text, so there is no "try a different mirror of the search UI" move here.

Data source

• https://unicourt.github.io/cic-code-ms/ — a GitHub Pages copy of the Mississippi Code, built by UniCourt on behalf of Public.Resource.Org from the Code's own officially-released RTF volumes (archive.org/download/gov.ms.code.ann.2018), "in the public domain, NO RIGHTS RESERVED" per that repo's own README. One title per HTML page (gov.ms.code.title.{NN}.html, title zero-padded to 2 digits — Mississippi titles are odd numbers 1-99), fetched LIVE per ms_code_section / ms_code_chapters call — this pack proxies it, it does not ship a copy of the Code in the repo (mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does-not in the Pipeworx CLAUDE.md licence section).

  The underlying statutory TEXT is public law regardless of what any publisher's licence says about its own rendering — enacted law carries no copyright (Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); Veeck v. SBCCI, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002) (en banc)).

THE HONEST LIMIT. This source is Release 78, released 2020-07-08, generated from the Code's 2018 printed RTF volumes. It is a static snapshot, not a continuously updated feed — amendments enacted in the 2021 through 2026 Regular Sessions are not reflected. Every response carries current_through and data_as_of: "2020-07-08" rather than defaulting to "now", which would misrepresent six-year-old text as current law. For anything enacted after mid-2020, verify against the official LexisNexis- hosted Code or contact the Joint Legislative Committee on Compilation, Revision and Publication of Legislation (Miss. Code Ann. §§ 1-1-101 to 1-1-111).

Title 79 (Corporations, Associations, and Partnerships) cannot be looked up section-by-section. Checked live across all 50 titles (2026-10-09): every other title's section-heading tag (h3, id attribute formatted t{title}c{chapter}s{citation}) carries that id — 27,688 sections total — but Title 79's ~700 section headings are all bare h3 tags with no id at all (reused instead for unrelated asides like editor's notes), and the internal citation anchor it links to (e.g. href="#t79c01s79-1-1") is dangling — no element in that title's document carries that id. ms_code_section names this explicitly (reason: "title_markup_unsupported") rather than returning an indistinguishable citation_not_found. ms_code_chapters still works for Title 79 (its chapter table of contents is intact); only section-level text extraction is blocked.

The overlay: later acts, never merged (fleet #2915)

Bruce kept ms_code_section on the frozen 2020-07-08 snapshot ("we'll need to figure something out") rather than chase a fully reconciled current code — the same ruling arkansas-code's overlay (fleet #2906) shipped under. This overlay is the cheapest honest improvement on top of that decision — design and measurements in docs/current-statute-routes.md (#2902).

Unlike Arkansas, Mississippi's legislature publishes no ready-made citation-to-act index. billstatus.ls.state.ms.us has bill-status pages and signed-bill text, not a "sections amended" lookup — so this overlay is home-built: crawl every enacted bill's own signed text and parse the boilerplate every Mississippi amending bill uses, "SECTION N. Section <cite>, Mississippi Code of 1972, is amended as follows:" (also "is created"/"shall be codified as Section <cite>, Mississippi Code of 1972"/"is repealed"/"is brought forward as follows"/"is reenacted as follows" — a sunset-renewal verb folded into the "amended" bucket since it touches the citation the same way).

The rule: never rewrite the snapshot text. Only ever ADD a dated, linked list beside it, explicitly labelled as not merged. ms_code_section's response carries:

• later_acts — one entry per act that touched this exact citation since the snapshot date: chapter (the Session Laws chapter number, from the bill's own history record — null if not yet assigned), session (human-readable, e.g. "2025 Regular Session"), verb (amended/created/repealed/brought_forward), range_to (non-null only when the act touched a Sections X through Y RANGE rather than one citation — see "Ranges" below), link (the bill's own signed-text page), bill (the measure number), source: "billstatus", and merged: false. Empty ([]) means the overlay shows no later act for this citation across every session checked — not that the overlay failed to load (a missing/malformed KV index throws loudly instead, same as ms_code_search's catchline index).
• sessions_checked — every session the overlay covers, named even when later_acts is empty, so a caller can tell "nothing changed" from "we didn't check."
• later_acts_data_as_of — when the overlay was last baked.

Ranges. A clause like "Sections 75-15-1 through 75-15-35, Mississippi Code of 1972, ... is hereby repealed" is kept as ONE row carrying both endpoints rather than this pack fabricating every citation in between (some of which may not exist — Mississippi section numbering is not always contiguous, confirmed live: one 2025 bill reenacted only the ODD-numbered sections of a chapter). ms_code_section matches a queried citation against a range by numeric containment on the trailing segment, with the same title-chapter prefix — not by this script guessing which numbers the range actually contains.

What is deliberately NOT indexed (measured on a 100-bill live sample, see "Measured coverage" below): a clause amending an uncodified SESSION LAW ("Section 7, Chapter 467, Laws of 2019, ... is amended") never mentions "the Mississippi Code of 1972" and is correctly excluded — it never touches a Code citation. A clause creating a brand-new section that has not yet been assigned a final citation ("Section N of this act shall be codified in Chapter X, Title Y, Mississippi Code of 1972") is excluded too — there is nothing to key a row on until the compiler assigns the number, which this source does not do.

A section not found in the Release-78 snapshot but present in the overlay is flagged specially: ms_code_section's found: false response carries later_acts_if_created — if this pack's own crawl shows acts against a citation that does not exist in the 2020 snapshot, that is a signal the section may have been CREATED after the snapshot date, not necessarily a bad citation.

Measured coverage (2026-10-10, 100 real enacted bills sampled evenly across the 2021-2025 Regular Sessions): 208 "SECTION N." clauses named "Mississippi Code of 1972" near their start; 207 parsed into a verb (99.5%). The one miss ("...Section 25-11-415, Mississippi Code of 1972, which provides that...") is a descriptive cross-reference inside an appropriations bill, not an amending clause — genuinely unparseable because it never uses one of the five recognized verbs, reported to stderr by scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs (--report-unparsed also emits it as a // UNPARSED_REPORT: comment in the generated file) rather than silently dropped. The full production run (every session discovered since 2021, not just the 100-bill sample) is the number actually baked into MS_LATER_ACTS below.

Source: billstatus.ls.state.ms.us — keyless, no bot wall, confirmed live 2026-10-10 (HTTP 200, plain HTML/XML, no JS rendering required). We are proxying the Legislature's own public bill-status site per request during the bake, not redistributing a copyrighted rendering — the statutory text itself carries no copyright (Banks v. Manchester; Veeck v. SBCCI, both cited above), and the bill text is the Legislature's own public record.

For Tennessee (next): reuse, don't re-derive. What carries over directly from this build (same shape Arkansas handed to this one): the response shape (later_acts/sessions_checked/ later_acts_merged_into_text: false/the "never rewrite text" rule), the baked-index + KV injection pattern (append new exports to the SAME src/<xx>-index-data.ts file the catchline index already uses), the session-discovery-over-hardcoding trick (read the live session list rather than a fixed one), and the scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs -> scripts/<xx>-later-acts-refresh.yml shape for the refresh workflow. Tennessee, like Mississippi, has no official citation index either (per docs/current-statute-routes.md) — its bill text is PDF (capitol.tn.gov), not HTML, so its boilerplate parser will need pdftotext rather than this pack's HTML-stripping, but the regex shape of the boilerplate itself is the same "SECTION N. Tennessee Code Annotated, Section X, is amended..." pattern.

Refreshing the baked indexes

src/ms-index-data.ts carries TWO independently-baked tables, both injected from KV via workers/gateway/src/pack-baked-indexes.json as one combined _bakedIndex object rather than bundled (fleet #2754: a value-imported multi-MB table loads into every gateway isolate whether or not it ever serves this pack):

• MS_SECTIONS — ms_code_search's catchline index, 27,688 rows across the 49 titles whose markup supports it (see "Title 79" above). Rebuild with node scripts/bake-index.mjs > src/ms-index-data.ts (OVERWRITES the file — see below). Re-run only if unicourt.github.io/cic-code-ms publishes a release newer than 78.
• MS_LATER_ACTS/MS_LATER_ACTS_SESSIONS_CHECKED — ms_code_section's overlay index (fleet #2915), built by crawling and parsing billstatus.ls.state.ms.us's own signed-bill text (no official index exists). Rebuild with node scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs >> src/ms-index-data.ts (APPENDS). Re-run after every Mississippi legislative session adjourns and Acts are signed — see .github/workflows/mississippi-later-acts-refresh.yml for the scheduled version. Session discovery is automatic (reads the live session list on billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/sessions.htm), so a new session shows up with no code change.

Full regen (both tables):

node scripts/bake-index.mjs > src/ms-index-data.ts
node scripts/bake-later-acts.mjs >> src/ms-index-data.ts

Run node ../../scripts/check-baked-indexes.mjs after either (from the repo root) — it dynamically imports the regenerated file the same way the KV uploader does, and refuses an empty exported array before it ever reaches deploy.

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mississippi-code/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/ms_code_section \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"citation":"97-3-19"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ms_code_section. 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": {
    "mississippi-code": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-mississippi-code"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-mississippi-code

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 Mississippi Code data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT