Swiss Case Law

What Swiss Case Law MCP server does

Swiss Case Law MCP server provides MCP access to Swiss court decisions and legislation for legal research. The corpus covers more than one million decision records from 1875 to the present, including federal courts and all 26 cantonal court systems. Search and retrieval are available in German, French, and Italian, with additional English ECtHR material described in the project coverage.

The service also exposes federal and cantonal laws, scholarly commentaries, legislation metadata, and citation relationships. Researchers can use it to locate authorities, inspect the text of a decision or statute, identify leading cases, and follow how decisions cite one another. The research-oriented generation tools can produce a mock decision outline or an exam question from real case-law material, but these outputs are intended for research and practice rather than as legal advice.

How it works

A client sends MCP tool calls to the public endpoint at https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/mcp. The remote service is read-only, requires no sign-up or API key, and can be used from an MCP-compatible client. The project also provides REST, CLI, and downloadable data access, but those are separate interfaces from the MCP connection.

Decision search accepts full-text queries and filters such as court, canton, language, date range, and chamber. Individual records can be retrieved by docket number or ID. Citation tools expose linked authorities, citation counts, confidence scores, and appeal relationships. Legislation tools search or retrieve federal and cantonal material, using local data where available and documented external sources or APIs for some content.

Tools and capabilities

The Swiss Case Law MCP server includes tools for:

• Searching decisions and listing courts with decision counts.
• Retrieving decisions with citation-graph counts and structured case briefs.
• Finding incoming and outgoing citations, appeal chains, leading cases, and doctrine timelines.
• Calculating year-by-year trends for a statute or legal topic and retrieving aggregate statistics.
• Looking up federal or cantonal laws by identifier, abbreviation, or canton.
• Searching legislation and commentaries, retrieving commentary for federal law articles, and browsing recent legislative changes.
• Drafting research-only mock decisions and generating practice questions based on real BGE fact patterns.
• Updating the local database and checking update progress when running the local-only maintenance tools.

Setup and configuration

Add the remote MCP URL to the client configuration. A minimal configuration uses the server name opencaselaw and the URL https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/mcp. No environment variables, credentials, or local database are required for the public remote service.

The repository also documents local database maintenance. The update_database and check_update_status tools are local-only, so their availability depends on running the relevant local setup rather than using only the public endpoint.

Limitations and notes

The dataset is broad but not guaranteed to contain every published decision where source portals restrict access. The project documents those coverage gaps. Citation-graph resolution is reported as coverage, not as a precision estimate, so a resolved relationship still requires legal review. Some cantonal decisions may retain upstream pseudonymisation or may be published without redaction.

Citation checking can establish that a reference exists, but it does not establish that the cited authority supports a particular proposition. Generated mock decisions and practice materials should likewise be treated as research aids. Code is licensed MIT and the corpus is identified as CC0, with stated exceptions for ECtHR texts.