AusLaw MCP

Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Australian legal research. Searches AustLII for case law and legislation, retrieves full-text judgements with paragraph numbers preserved, and supports OCR for scanned PDFs.

Status: ✅ Working MVP with intelligent search relevance

Features

Current Capabilities

• ✅ Case law search: Natural language queries (e.g., "negligence duty of care")

• ✅ Intelligent search relevance: Auto-detects case name queries vs topic searches and applies appropriate sorting

  • Case name queries (e.g., "Donoghue v Stevenson") use relevance sorting to find the specific case

  • Topic queries (e.g., "negligence duty of care") use date sorting for recent cases

  • Manual override available via sortBy parameter

• ✅ Legislation search: Find Australian Commonwealth and State legislation

• ✅ Primary sources only: Filters out journal articles and commentary

• ✅ Citation extraction: Extracts neutral citations like [2025] HCA 26

• ✅ Paragraph preservation: Keeps [N] paragraph numbers for pinpoint citations

• ✅ Multiple formats: JSON, text, markdown, or HTML output

• ✅ Document retrieval: Full text from HTML and PDF sources

• ✅ OCR support: Tesseract OCR fallback for scanned PDFs

Roadmap

• 🔜 Multi-source: Will add jade.io for reported judgements

• 🔜 Page numbers: Will extract page numbers from reported versions

• 🔜 Authority ranking: Will prioritise reported over unreported judgements

See ROADMAP.md for detailed development plans.

Quick Start

To build for production:

Running Tests

The project includes comprehensive integration tests covering real-world legal search scenarios:

Test scenarios include:

1. Negligence and duty of care - Personal injury law searches

2. Contract disputes - Commercial law and breach of contract

3. Constitutional law - High Court constitutional matters

4. Employment law - Unfair dismissal and workplace relations

5. Property and land law - Native title and land rights disputes

Tests validate:

• Results are properly formatted with required fields

• Only primary sources are returned (no journal articles)

• Recent cases are prioritized

• Document fetching works for returned URLs

MCP Registration

Configure your MCP-compatible client (eg. Claude Desktop, Cursor) to launch the compiled server.

For Claude Desktop, edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

Replace /path/to/auslaw-mcp with the actual path to your installation.

Available Tools

Once registered, the following tools are available:

search_cases

Search Australian case law using natural language queries.

Parameters:

• query (required): Search query in natural language (eg. "negligence duty of care", "Mabo")

• jurisdiction (optional): Filter by jurisdiction: "cth", "vic", "federal", "other"

• limit (optional): Maximum number of results (1-50, default 10)

• format (optional): Output format: "json", "text", "markdown", "html" (default "json")

• sortBy (optional): Sorting mode: "auto", "relevance", or "date" (default "auto")

  • "auto" (recommended): Intelligently detects case name queries (e.g., "X v Y", "Re X", citations) and uses relevance sorting to find the specific case; uses date sorting for topic searches

  • "relevance": Sort by relevance to query (best for finding specific cases by name)

  • "date": Sort by date, most recent first (best for finding recent cases on a topic)

Examples:

Finding a specific case by name (auto mode):

Finding recent cases on a topic:

search_legislation

Search Australian legislation.

Parameters:

• query (required): Search query in natural language

• jurisdiction (optional): Filter by jurisdiction: "cth", "vic", "federal", "other"

• limit (optional): Maximum number of results (1-50, default 10)

• format (optional): Output format: "json", "text", "markdown", "html" (default "json")

• sortBy (optional): Sorting mode: "auto", "relevance", or "date" (default "auto")

Example:

fetch_document_text

Fetch full text from a legislation or case URL. Supports HTML and PDF with OCR fallback for scanned PDFs.

Parameters:

• url (required): URL of the document to fetch

• format (optional): Output format: "json", "text", "markdown", "html" (default "json")

Example:

Features Implemented

• ✅ AustLII search integration with HTML parsing for cases and legislation

• ✅ Natural language query support (eg. "negligence duty of care")

• ✅ Document text extraction for HTML documents

• ✅ PDF text extraction with OCR fallback for scanned documents (requires Tesseract)

• ✅ Neutral citation and jurisdiction extraction

• ✅ Multiple output formats (JSON, text, markdown, HTML)

Contributing

See AGENTS.md for AI agent instructions and development guidelines.

Key principles:

• Primary sources only (no journal articles)

• Citation accuracy is paramount

• All tests must pass before committing

• Real-world testing (hits live AustLII)

Project Structure

Roadmap

See docs/ROADMAP.md and Issue #2 for detailed development plans.

Next priorities:

1. ✅ Fix search relevance for case name queries (Completed)

2. Add jade.io integration for reported judgements

3. Extract page numbers for pinpoint citations

4. Implement authority-based result ranking

License

MIT