Legal Research Agent

A small MCP server that gives students a Claude-based research assistant backed by real, citable, free legal sources — no Westlaw/Lexis login required:

• CourtListener (run by the nonprofit Free Law Project) — full-text US case law search and opinion text.

• Cornell Law School's Wex — a free, authoritative legal dictionary/encyclopedia.

Students connect to it as a remote connector in Claude.ai — no local install, no API keys of their own. You (the instructor) host one server; every student in the class points Claude at the same URL.

Tools it exposes

Every response includes its source URL so students can (and should) verify and cite the original.

Related MCP server: CourtListener MCP Server

1. Run it locally first (sanity check)

cd law
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python server.py

This starts a Streamable HTTP server on http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp. This step is just to confirm it boots on your machine — students won't run this themselves.

2. Deploy it somewhere it can stay running

Students need a stable URL, so this needs a real (if tiny) host — GitHub Pages alone can't run a Python process. Render's free tier is the easiest option and needs no code changes:

1. Push this repo to GitHub (see below).

2. In Render, New > Blueprint, point it at your GitHub repo — it will read render.yaml and configure everything. (Or: New > Web Service, build command pip install -r requirements.txt, start command python server.py.)

3. Deploy. Render gives you a URL like https://legal-research-agent.onrender.com.

4. Your MCP endpoint is that URL plus /mcp: https://legal-research-agent.onrender.com/mcp

Note: Render's free tier sleeps after inactivity, so the first request after a quiet period takes ~30-50 seconds to wake up. Fine for a classroom tool; worth mentioning to students so they don't think it's broken.

Getting a free CourtListener API token (recommended)

Unauthenticated search works out of the box at a low rate limit — fine for trying it out, risky for a whole class hitting it during an assignment.

1. Create a free account at courtlistener.com.

2. Go to your profile settings > API and copy your token.

3. In Render, go to your service > Environment > add COURTLISTENER_API_TOKEN = your token. Redeploy.

This also unlocks get_opinion_text (full opinion text requires auth on CourtListener's side regardless of rate limit).

3. Push to GitHub

git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-username>/legal-research-agent.git
git push -u origin main

(Nothing sensitive is in this repo — the token lives only in Render's environment variables, never in git, per .gitignore.)

4. Give students the connector URL

In Claude.ai: Settings > Connectors > Add custom connector, paste your /mcp URL from step 2. Once connected, students can ask things like:

"Find the case where the Supreme Court established the Miranda warning requirement, and give me the citation."

"What's the legal definition of promissory estoppel?"

Limitations students should know

• CourtListener is a large, reputable, but not-exhaustive free database — it doesn't have everything Westlaw/Lexis has, especially older or obscure state cases.

• This is a research aid, not legal advice and not a substitute for reading the actual opinion — always click through to the source.

• Wex is Cornell's own reference material, written for public education; it's a great starting definition, not a substitute for a case-specific legal argument.