search_cases
Find relevant case law from Illinois, federal, SCOTUS, and 7th Circuit courts using natural language queries, citations, or Boolean operators. Apply filters for jurisdiction, date range, and precedential status.
Instructions
Search the Freecase case-law corpus (Illinois, federal, SCOTUS, 7th Circuit).
Requires a Freecase connector key in the FREECASE_MCP_KEY environment variable; without one, this tool returns an error explaining how to set it.
Returns the query echoed back, candidate/return counts, whether AI
reranking ran, and a results array. Each result mirrors the Freecase API
fields exactly (case_name, court_full, date_filed, snippet, treatment_status,
cluster_id, etc.). The score field is Freecase's own opaque combined
ranking score (a weighted mix of text relevance, court authority, recency,
and citation count) — it is NOT a normalized 0-1 relevance value; use it only
to compare results within one response. Pass a result's cluster_id to
get_opinion to read the full text.
Args: q: The search query (see field description — forwarded unchanged). jurisdiction: Court scope to search within. date_from: Earliest decision date (YYYY-MM-DD). date_to: Latest decision date (YYYY-MM-DD). precedential: Exclude unpublished/errata opinions (default true). rerank: Enable AI reranking (slower, AI-metered; default false). fast: Use the faster rerank model (only when rerank is true). limit: Maximum number of results (1-200; default 25).
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| q | Yes | The search query, forwarded to Freecase as-is. Freecase detects reporter citations (e.g. '410 U.S. 113'), case names, keywords, and Boolean/proximity operators server-side — do not pre-parse or rewrite the query. | |
| fast | No | When reranking, use the faster/cheaper model. Ignored if rerank is false. | |
| limit | No | Maximum results to return (1-200). Defaults to 25. | |
| rerank | No | Run the AI reranker over the results for better ordering. Slower (can take up to ~90s) and metered as AI-assisted use, so it is off by default — turn it on only when ranking quality matters. | |
| date_to | No | Latest decision date, YYYY-MM-DD. Omit for no upper bound. | |
| date_from | No | Earliest decision date, YYYY-MM-DD. Omit for no lower bound. | |
| jurisdiction | No | One of: 'all', 'il' (Illinois), 'federal', 'scotus' (U.S. Supreme Court), 'ca7' (7th Circuit). | all |
| precedential | No | Exclude unpublished/errata opinions. Defaults to true. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||