vaquill-mcp

MCP server for Vaquill legal research API. Covers US federal and 50-state primary law: USC, CFR, state statutes and regulations, state and US constitutions, court rules, the Federal Register, executive orders, and agency guidance. Search primary law, resolve statutory citations, browse the hierarchy, and ground answers in official sources, all from your AI tools.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

Sign up at vaquill.ai to get your API key.

Claude.ai (Web)

No installation needed. Add as a remote MCP server from Customize > Connectors > Add custom connector:

Option A: Bearer token (recommended)

Open the Request headers section of the same dialog and add the credential there:

URL:            https://mcp.vaquill.ai/mcp
Header name:    Authorization
Header value:   Bearer vq_key_your_key_here

Claude sends the value exactly as you type it and adds no scheme of its own, so the value field holds Bearer vq_key_... and not Authorization: Bearer vq_key_....

Option B: API key in the URL (compatibility)

https://mcp.vaquill.ai/s/vq_key_your_key_here

Still live, and still the only form that works where a client cannot send a header at all. Prefer Option A everywhere else: a credential in a URL is recorded in server logs, proxies and browsing history, which is why Anthropic's connector guidance advises against it and the MCP specification prohibits it.

Available on Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans. The Request headers section is in beta and is enabled per account, it accepts a short allowlist of header names, and it holds at most four. On Team and Enterprise an owner adds the connector under Organization settings first.

Claude Desktop

Open the config file from Settings > Developer > Edit Config:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["vaquill-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "VAQUILL_API_KEY": "vq_key_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

For Indian legislation, add --jurisdiction IN. One process serves one corpus, so run two entries if you want both:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["vaquill-mcp"],
      "env": { "VAQUILL_API_KEY": "vq_key_your_key_here" }
    },
    "vaquill-india": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["vaquill-mcp", "--jurisdiction", "IN"],
      "env": { "VAQUILL_API_KEY": "vq_key_your_key_here" }
    }
  }
}

Quit Claude completely and reopen it. It does not reload the file.

Claude Code

Remote (no install):

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user vaquill \
  https://mcp.vaquill.ai/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer vq_key_your_key_here"

Local (via uvx):

claude mcp add --scope user vaquill -e VAQUILL_API_KEY=vq_key_your_key_here \
  -- uvx vaquill-mcp

--scope user registers the server for every project; the default is the current directory only. -e stores the key with the registration, so it survives Claude Code being launched from an IDE, which an export in your shell profile does not. Both --header and -e are variadic, so they have to come after the server name.

Cursor

Edit ~/.cursor/mcp.json for every project, or .cursor/mcp.json for one.

Remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "url": "https://mcp.vaquill.ai/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer vq_key_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Local (via uvx):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["vaquill-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "VAQUILL_API_KEY": "vq_key_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

VS Code (Copilot)

Add to .vscode/mcp.json. For every project instead of one, run the MCP: Open User Configuration command and use the same shape there.

Remote:

{
  "inputs": [
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "vaquill-authorization",
      "description": "Authorization header value",
      "password": true
    }
  ],
  "servers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.vaquill.ai/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "${input:vaquill-authorization}"
      }
    }
  }
}

The credential goes in a prompt rather than in the file, so the file is safe to commit. VS Code asks for it on first start and remembers it. Restart the server after saving, or the tools will not appear.

Local (via uvx):

{
  "servers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["vaquill-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "VAQUILL_API_KEY": "vq_key_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Windsurf

Add to ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json.

Remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "serverUrl": "https://mcp.vaquill.ai/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer vq_key_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Windsurf uses serverUrl for a remote server, not url, and interpolates ${env:VAR} if you would rather read the credential from the environment.

Local (via uvx):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vaquill": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["vaquill-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "VAQUILL_API_KEY": "vq_key_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Available Tools

Tools are generated from the live Vaquill API's OpenAPI spec at startup, so the set always matches the current API. For the authoritative, up-to-date list and per-call credit costs, run the free get_pricing tool or inspect your MCP client's tool list. The main groups (representative tools shown):

US statutes & regulations

USC, CFR, all 50 state codes, constitutions, state court rules, the Federal Register, and agency guidance.

Reading a section in context

Law change alerts

Subscribe to a corpus source and get a webhook or email when it changes. Subscribing, polling and inspecting deliveries are all free; only get_watch_change_diff is metered, because it is the only one that returns section text.

Utility

search and fetch exist because ChatGPT's deep research and company-knowledge connectors match a corpus server by those exact names and their single-string signature, and refuse to work without them. They are thin wrappers over the typed tools above, which any client that can call them should prefer: the typed ones filter by jurisdiction, corpus, date and status, and these two do not. fetch is deliberately lenient about its id, accepting an act_id, a citation URL, a bare path, or a Bluebook citation such as 42 U.S.C. 1983.

Resources and prompts

This server is not only tools. An MCP server generated from an OpenAPI document publishes one tool per endpoint and nothing else; these two primitives are where the knowledge that is not in the API lives, and neither costs anything in the per-turn tool budget.

Resources (read, don't call):