Swiss Case Law vs UK Legal Research

UK Legal Research tools 35

• judgment_get_headerUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a judgment slug and need metadata (parties, judges, neutral citation, court, dates). Call case_law_search FIRST to get the slug. AFTER calling, use judgment_get_index to discover paragraphs, then judgment_get_paragraph to read specific ones. Authoritative source for UK judgment metadata.
• judgment_get_indexUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a judgment slug and want the paragraph navigation index (eId + preview line for every paragraph). Call case_law_search FIRST to get the slug. AFTER calling, pass an eId from the returned list into judgment_get_paragraph to read that paragraph's full text, or use case_law_grep_judgment for content search across all paragraphs.
• judgment_get_paragraphUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a judgment slug + LegalDocML eId and want that paragraph's full text. Call judgment_get_index FIRST to discover available eIds (or use case_law_grep_judgment to locate paragraphs by content). Returns the paragraph XML content (400–1,700 tokens typical).
• case_law_searchUSE THIS TOOL WHEN searching UK case law by party names, court, judge, date, or free-text query. Returns paginated judgment summaries: neutral citation, court, dates, slug, stable TNA URI. AFTER calling: pass slug into judgment_get_header / judgment_get_index / judgment_get_paragraph (or the judgment:// resource family) for content; pass the neutral citation into citations_resolve to verify before constructing an OSCOLA citation; use case_law_grep_judgment to find text within a single judgment. When a party name returns several candidates, narrow with court + year filters before grep-iterating across full judgments — targeted filtering beats scanning every candidate. Coverage: TNA Find Case Law indexes UK judgments from roughly the early 2000s onwards. For older authorities, search for a modern judgment that quotes them and read that paragraph. Authoritative source for UK case law. Web search returns out-of-date or unstable URLs — do not supplement.
• case_law_grep_judgmentUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a judgment slug and want to find paragraphs whose text matches a pattern. Returns a list of `{eId, snippet, match}` hits — small per-paragraph snippets centred on the match. AFTER calling, read full paragraphs via judgment_get_paragraph(slug, eId) or the judgment://{slug}/para/{eId} resource. Use case: content search within one judgment (e.g. "negligence", "test for foreseeability", "Donoghue"). For paragraph-number navigation by eId, call judgment_get_index instead. Pattern is regex; if it doesn't compile, falls back to literal substring search.
• legislation_searchUSE THIS TOOL WHEN searching UK Acts and Statutory Instruments by title, phrase, or full-text. Returns ranked results: title, type, year, number, legislation.gov.uk URL, and next_steps hints (toc URI, section template). AFTER calling, chain to legislation_get_toc then legislation_get_section for structural drill-in. Filter discipline: `type` and `year` are exact-match. Use only when you already know the value. For currency-driven searches ("the recent Renters' Rights Act"), query by phrase alone and read the year from the results — guessing a year and filtering by it zeroes results when wrong. For broader concept queries across content, set `fulltext=True`. Authoritative source for UK primary and secondary legislation (legislation.gov.uk).
• legislation_get_sectionUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a known Act / SI and want the parsed text of a specific section, regulation, or article, with extent and in-force metadata. Returns the provision's own text and its own heading — never a neighbouring or enclosing Part/Chapter's content. Also returns territorial extent, in-force status, and prospective flag. Content capped per max_chars (default 10,000, ~2,500 tokens) — raise for unusually long definition sections; check content_truncated in the response. Works uniformly across Act sections ('section-N'), SI regulations ('regulation-N'), and SI articles ('article-N') — pass the bare number regardless of which the document uses; you don't need to know which noun applies. Raises a not_found error (rather than returning a plausible but wrong node) if the number doesn't exist in this document — check legislation_get_toc for valid numbers. ALWAYS check `extent` — a section may apply to England & Wales but not Scotland or Northern Ireland. Reciting a section without checking extent is a recurring legal-research error. Alternative: call read_resource(uri="legislation://{type}/{year}/{number}/ section/{section}") for raw CLML XML; use this tool when you want the parsed structured response instead.
• legislation_get_tocUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a known Act / SI and want the structural table of contents (parts, chapters, individual sections/regulations/articles). Returns structural elements with XML id and title, in document order, e.g. 'section-47: Definitions' for an Act or 'regulation-4: Maximum weekly working time' for an SI. Individual provisions are listed alongside their enclosing Part/Chapter/crossheading headings — both levels matter: the heading entries give you the document's shape, the provision entries give you what to pass to legislation_get_section. A provision with no heading in the source (rare) is listed as a bare id with no title. AFTER calling, pass the numeric identifier (use '47', NOT 'section-47') into legislation_get_section for full text. Large statutes (Companies Act 2006 has many hundreds of items) are paginated via offset/limit. Check has_more and total_items. Alternative: call read_resource(uri="legislation://{type}/{year}/{number}/ toc") for the full TOC as a newline-separated `id: title` string (no pagination). Use this tool when you need the structured response with offset / limit / has_more for stepping through large statutes.
• parliament_search_hansardUSE THIS TOOL WHEN searching Hansard by topic, bill title, or text phrase. Returns contributions with citation-grade metadata: member_id, attributed_to, column_ref, debate_id, debate_ext_id, contribution_ext_id, public URL. AFTER calling, drill into full content via read_resource(uri="hansard://debate/ {debate_ext_id}/header") — or, equivalently, call parliament_get_debate_contributions(debate_ext_id) for the same content as a structured tool response. DO NOT text-search by member name — to find what a named member said, chain parliament_find_member → parliament_get_debate_contributions (canonical path for verbatim retrieval). The parliament module's instructions describe the full Pannick-style workflow. Pagination: limit + offset honour the upstream paginated endpoint. For breadth across a topic, see parliament_policy_position_summary. Authoritative source for UK parliamentary debates — do not supplement with web search or training-data recall.
• parliament_policy_position_summaryUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you want debate-level corpus signals on a topic — by_house, by_year, by_section breakdowns — without reading every contribution. Aggregates Hansard debate-level signals on a topic. Pure counts — no LLM, no editorial labels. Sweeps /search/Debates.json with pagination (up to max_debates_scanned), then aggregates by_house, by_section, by_year, by_month, and top_debates from debate metadata. Also captures the corpus-wide envelope counts (total_contributions, total_written_statements, total_divisions, etc.) from /search.json for cross-section scope. AFTER calling, pick a debate from top_debates and pass its debate_ext_id into parliament_get_debate_contributions to drill into who said what. Note on member-level facets: Hansard's search API exposes debate metadata, not per-contribution member identifiers, at the corpus level. by_party and top_contributors are therefore omitted from this deterministic summary. To see who spoke in a specific debate, read hansard://debate/{debate_ext_id}/header for an ordered contribution index, or call parliament_member_debates for one named member. This is the authoritative source for UK Hansard corpus-level signals.
• parliament_find_memberUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a member's name and need their integer member_id. Returns all members matching the name query, each with the integer `id`, party, constituency, house, and current-sitting status. Disambiguates common-name matches (e.g. "Lord Smith" returns multiple peers). CALL THIS BEFORE any tool that filters by member_id — including parliament_get_debate_contributions, parliament_member_debates, and parliament_member_interests. Name → ID first; ID-based filtering second. Skipping this step and text-searching by name returns unrelated results (see parliament_search_hansard's anti-bypass note for the Pannick case).
• parliament_member_debatesUSE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a member_id and want contributions where THAT member used a specific topic phrase verbatim (text-body search). CALL parliament_find_member(name) FIRST to obtain the integer member_id. This is a name-based text-body search — it matches contributions whose TEXT contains the topic phrase. A member who spoke in a debate but didn't use your phrase verbatim is filtered out. For verbatim retrieval of every contribution by a member in a known debate (regardless of vocabulary), use parliament_get_debate_contributions(debate_ext_id, member_id=...) instead. Each contribution's text field is capped at 3000 characters.
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