@pipeworx/ni-caselaw

Northern Ireland court and tribunal judicial decisions, read live from judiciaryni.uk — the Court of Appeal, Crown Court, King's Bench Division, Family Division, Coroner's Court, Master's decisions, the Valuation Tribunal and others.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1867+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• search_ni_decisions(query?, court?, year?, limit?) — search decisions by keyword, court code (e.g. "nica") and/or year. Returns title, neutral citation, court, date, judge and a link to the decision's PDF for each match.

• get_ni_decision(slug) — one decision by its judiciaryni.uk slug (e.g. "2026-nica-36"). Returns full metadata + pdf_url; text is always null and text_extracted is always false — see below.

Related MCP server: BAILII MCP Server

Auth

Keyless. No operator key needed.

Data sources

• https://www.judiciaryni.uk/judicial-decisions — a Drupal Views listing. Probed live 2026-09-18. Three real server-side facets exist: /judicial-decisions/date/<year> (also <year>-<month>), /judicial-decisions/type/<slug-id> and /judicial-decisions/judiciary/<id>, plus a keyword box (?query_decisions=<text>). There is no court facet. The court a decision belongs to is only ever visible inside its neutral citation and, for most modern decisions, inside its own URL slug (/judicial-decisions/2026-nica-36). search_ni_decisions's court filter is therefore applied CLIENT-SIDE while paging the listing, not passed to the upstream as a query param — combine it with year to narrow a rare court quickly, since the per-call page budget is bounded (20 pages) and a rare court with no year given may need more pages than that to surface enough matches (the response's truncated/pages_scanned fields say so rather than reading as "no more decisions exist").

  query_decisions is a genuine full-text search across the WHOLE corpus, not a court filter — searching "NICA" returns 2,822 hits, because that literal string also appears inside other courts' citations of NICA cases. It is offered here only for keyword search, same as the site's own search box.

  rss.xml on this site returns 0 items — checked live, not assumed, and not used.

  User-Agent matters here in an unusual way. A UA string containing the word "Bot" (tested: "...PipeworxBot/1.0...") gets a flat 405 from this site's edge (Varnish), while a plain identifying UA (pipeworx-mcp-ni-caselaw/1.0 (+https://pipeworx.io), matching the monorepo's usual pattern) gets a normal 200. Not a robots.txt matter — this is public data with no restriction, and the ruling on robots is settled — just a WAF quirk worth knowing before assuming the site is blocking bots.

• TEXT IS PDF-ONLY. Every decision's full text is a PDF under /files/judiciaryni/<yyyy-mm>/<name>.pdf; the site's HTML never carries extracted text. This pack does not parse PDFs — no PDF-text-extraction helper exists anywhere in this monorepo (checked mcps/*, shared/src), and every other pack here that hits a PDF-only judicial source (gao-protests, recap) ships the same way: metadata + a direct link, text_extracted left false rather than guessed or silently empty. get_ni_decision always returns text: null, text_extracted: false and says so in its own description and in a note field — per the silent-zero policy, a caller has to be TOLD the text isn't there, never left to notice an empty field on its own.

• Court codes are not a controlled vocabulary on the site — they are whatever the neutral citation says. The common ones observed live: nica (Court of Appeal), nicc (Crown Court), nikb (King's Bench Division, called niqb before the 2022 accession — older decisions may use either), nifam (Family Division), nicoroner (Coroner's Court), nimaster (Master's decisions), nivt (Valuation Tribunal, whose slugs don't carry a year prefix, e.g. nivt-325). Older Social Security/Child Support Commissioner decisions (e.g. "C12/25-26(PIP)") don't reduce to a clean court code at all — deriveCourt returns null for those rather than guessing, and a court filter simply won't match them (correct behaviour, not a bug).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ni-caselaw": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ni-caselaw/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ni-caselaw/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1867+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_ni_decisions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"court":"nica","year":2026,"limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_ni_decisions. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-ni-caselaw is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ni-caselaw/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ni-caselaw": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-ni-caselaw"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Ni Caselaw data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT