@pipeworx/scotcourts

Scottish court and tribunal judgment search — Court of Session, High Court of Justiciary, the National Personal Injury Court, Sheriff Appeal Courts, Sheriff Court civil/criminal, and the Scottish Upper Tribunal chambers, from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), published from 1999 onward.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• search_scottish_judgments(query?, court?, from_date?, to_date?, page?, limit?) — searches the judgment index; returns title, court, judges, date and a document_link to the PDF, plus the true corpus match count.

• get_scottish_judgment(document_link?, query?) — resolves a judgment document_link (or looks one up by case name/query first) and confirms the PDF is actually reachable: HTTP status, content-type, size. Does not extract PDF text — SCTS judgments are PDF-only and no PDF-text-extraction dependency exists anywhere in this catalog; text_extracted: false is always returned alongside pdf_url.

Related MCP server: BAILII MCP Server

Auth

Keyless. No API key, no cookie, no bearer token — verified live with a plain curl (no browser session) against api.pa.web.scotcourts.gov.uk/web/search.

Data sources

• https://api.pa.web.scotcourts.gov.uk/web/search (POST, JSON) — the judgment search index behind the client-rendered SPA at scotcourts.gov.uk/judgments/#/. Do not use scotcourts.gov.uk/search-results/?filterType=Judgments — that is the generic sitewide search (server-rendered HTML) and returns news articles and hearing/livestream pages mixed in with real judgments; it was ruled out as a dead end for this pack (fleet #2259).

• https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk<documentLink> — the judgment PDF itself. documentLink in the API response is relative; resolve it against this host.

Traps found while building this (fleet #2259 spike, #2262 build)

• The judgments SPA and the sitewide search are two entirely separate apps on two different hosts. The static bundle referenced from /judgments/ itself (/apps/scts-web-apps.min.js) is shared site-wide chrome and does not contain the judgments app's own logic — it is loaded dynamically at runtime, so the request shape was captured by driving the live page with devtools/a monkey-patched window.fetch, not by reading a static bundle.

• filters shape (proven live, both in-browser and via a bare curl):

  • Court: {"field":"Court","value":"<exact dropdown string>"} — values are NOT guessable from a court's common name (e.g. the dropdown says "Court of Session", not "Court of Session (Outer House)"). The full list is in COURTS in src/index.ts.

  • Date range: {"field":"AdditionalDate","value":"<from>|<to>"} — either side of the pipe may be blank for an open-ended range ("2020-01-01|" = from-only, "|2020-01-01" = to-only). Both forms verified live.

  • An unrecognised Court value does not error — it returns HTTP 200 with results: [] and pagination.count.total: 0, which reads exactly like "no such judgments" if not caught. This pack validates court against the known list before sending the filter.

  • The "Show more filters" panel behind the four basic fields (keyword, court, date-from, date-to) was not reverse-engineered — out of scope for this build; only what was proven ships.

• pagination.count.total is the true corpus match count; results.length is capped by the limit sent in the request. Surface total, never results.length, as "how many judgments matched."

• Coverage disclosure: this index is whatever SCTS has chosen to publish, from 1999 onward — not every Scottish judgment ever issued. Sheriff court and tribunal coverage is thin next to the higher courts. This is Scots law; England & Wales / UK Supreme Court / UK tribunal decisions are a different corpus (@pipeworx/uk-caselaw).

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/scotcourts/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 1856+ 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_scottish_judgments \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"negligence"}'

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

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-scotcourts 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/scotcourts/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

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

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 Scotcourts data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT