Northern Mariana Code README

@pipeworx/northern-mariana-code

Commonwealth Code of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI statutes) — section text by citation (e.g. "6 CMC § 1101"), and topic/keyword search over official catchlines. Fleet #2892, one of six jurisdictions (DC + five territories) with no code pack as of 2026-10-09.

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

• nmi_statute(citation) — text of one Commonwealth Code section by citation (e.g. "6 CMC 1101", murder; "1 CMC 101", defines "Northern Mariana Islands"), with the official catchline and title context. Tries the official site live first, falls back to an Internet Archive Wayback Machine capture of the SAME official PDF when the live site is unreachable (it has been, since around 2026-10 — see "The current outage" below). Every response carries route ("live" or "wayback"), data_as_of, and a staleness_warning on the fallback route.
• nmi_search(query, limit?) — topic/keyword search over official section catchlines across all 10 titles (e.g. "murder", "tax"). Not full-text search — see "Known gaps".

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://cnmilaw.org/pdf/cmc_section/T{title}/{section}.pdf — the CNMI Law Revision Commission's own per-section PDF (e.g. Title 6 § 1101 is .../T6/1101.pdf). nmi_statute fetches this live, per request, with an 8s timeout, and extracts the matching section's text.
• https://web.archive.org/web/{timestamp}if_/{that same PDF URL} — the Wayback Machine's own crawl of that identical official PDF, used only when the live fetch above fails. One request resolves to the nearest actual capture via Wayback's own redirect (/web/{today}if_/{url} 302s to the closest real snapshot) — no separate CDX lookup per call; the CDX API rate-limits aggressively under repeated querying (measured directly while building this pack: the same query that succeeds once starts 503ing within a handful of calls).
• mcps/northern-mariana-code/scripts/bake-index.mjs fetches the title listing page (cnmilaw.org/cmc.php, or its most recent readable Wayback capture) once, offline, and bakes a citation+catchline index into src/nmi-index-data.ts for nmi_search and for nmi_statute's "citation exists but is unreachable" vs. "no such citation" distinction — the full set of ~7,100 sections is too large to scan per search query.

The current outage — read this before assuming the live route is dead

cnmilaw.org is unreachable right now (verified live 2026-10-09), but this looks temporary, not a shutdown. Checked three ways:

1. A plain residential HTTPS request times out / gets no response.
2. A wrangler dev --remote Worker edge probe — i.e. not a geo-block — gets a Cloudflare 522 ("origin unreachable") on both cnmilaw.org/ and cnmilaw.org/pdf/cmc_section/T6/1101.pdf.
3. The bare-HTTP vhost (no TLS) resolves to a different backend entirely: a Network Solutions registrar page reading "This domain has been temporarily disabled. If you own this domain, please log in to your account manager to re-enable the domain." — a registrar-level suspension (lapsed renewal, most likely), not a bot wall or a CAPTCHA.

The Wayback Machine's own crawler was still getting live 200 PDFs from this exact path as recently as 2026-02-17 (confirmed via its CDX index), so this is a recent lapse, not a long-dead site. nmi_statute tries cnmilaw.org live first on every call (8s timeout) — if the registration is restored, calls start routing "route": "live" again with no code change needed. There was no need to build a baked copy of the statutory text itself (unlike arkansas-code's 2012 PRO scan): the Wayback Machine already holds its own crawl of the identical official PDFs, so falling back to a live per-request fetch of that memento is still "calling", not "copying", under root CLAUDE.md's proxy-vs-mirror rule.

Capabilities

• Citation lookup — nmi_statute, live-first with a Wayback fallback.
• Topic/keyword search — nmi_search, over catchlines only.
• Amendments/enactment history — embedded in the statutory text itself (a Source: PL ... line at the end of most sections) but not parsed into a separate field — CNMI PDFs do not carry a structured history node the way Arkansas's XML scan does.
• Historical version (text as it read before a given amendment) — NOT AVAILABLE from any free source found.

Parsing note

Section PDFs are extracted with the shared extractPdfText() helper (shared/src/pdf-text.ts) — the same one kentucky-code and north-dakota-code use. The catchline index parses cmc.php's own anchor text (an anchor tag linking to .../T6/1101.pdf with text "§ 1101. Murder."), stripping the leading section number the href already carries.

Refresh path: node scripts/bake-index.mjs > src/nmi-index-data.ts — tries cnmilaw.org live first, falls back to the most recent readable Wayback capture of cmc.php automatically. Re-run occasionally to pick up newly-enacted sections; nmi_statute itself never depends on this file being current, since it always fetches statutory text live or from Wayback per call.

Known gaps

• nmi_search matches official catchlines only, not full statutory text — a topic discussed inside a section's body but absent from its catchline will not be found.
• While cnmilaw.org is down, every nmi_statute call that succeeds does so via Wayback and carries whatever date that section happened to be last crawled — individual sections' snapshot dates vary (seen during testing: 2024-08-13 for one section, 2026-02-17 for another), not a single fixed cutoff the way arkansas-code's 2012 scan is. Always check data_as_of per response rather than assuming a pack-wide date.
• A citation whose title/section both parse but that is in neither the live site nor Wayback AND not in the baked index is reported as citation_not_found; one that IS in the baked index but unreachable on both routes is reported as a loud upstream_down error, never a false found: false.

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/northern-mariana-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/nmi_statute \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"citation":"6 CMC 1101"}'

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

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-northern-mariana-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 Northern Mariana Code data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT