michigan-law-mcp

An MCP server that gives Claude and other agents access to Michigan statutes and rules from a local SQLite store refreshed by a daily job.

MIT-licensed (see LICENSE). This repository is the code only: no copy of the Michigan Compiled Laws is included or distributed. If you're standing up your own instance, read NOTICE and docs/lsb-reply-2026-09-21.md first -- they cover what the Michigan Legislature has said about automated access, rate limits, and reuse, as of 2026-09-21. That understanding was reached for this project specifically; running your own instance means keeping to it yourself (a real contact address in your crawler's user agent, the requested rate limit, the standing NOTICE) and confirming nothing has changed since. None of this is legal advice.

Status: two independent parsers agree on real law; XML is primary, HTML is the cross-check. The server, schema, full-text search, version history, change tracking, cross-reference graph, polite crawler and ingest pipeline are tested (139 tests). Two parsers now read the same chapters -- the Legislature's whole-chapter HTML (Home/RenderDoc?objectName=mcl-chapNN, chapterdoc.py) and its own machine-readable XML (documents/mcl/Chapter N.xml, confirmed as the canonical source in docs/lsb-reply-2026-09-21.md; mclxml.py) -- and Chapter 37 (17 acts and E.R.O.s, 142 sections) parses identically from both, field for field (text, catchlines, history, compiler's notes, division structure, the repealed range), with zero warnings either way. Chapter 2 exercises the XML source's edge cases: a .new variant section (a law passed but not yet in force, represented as its own statute entry alongside the real acts), a table embedded inside a paragraph, and two old repealed entries whose SectRef names an extra citation beyond their own MCLNumber (kept as a range stub, not dropped). Three more real chapters (760, 333, 750, 43 MB combined) now parse with zero warnings and zero integrity problems too, confirmed with a full end-to-end ingest (3,777 documents, 22 chapters, one run); see "Real chapters parsed so far" below for what each one exercised, including Chapter 760.xml's MultiChapter case (one file legitimately spanning 20 chapters). MclWebSource and MclXmlWebSource fetch chapters through the polite client (the Legislature has permitted automated access, see below); MclXmlWebSource discovers chapters from the directory listing (manifest.py). mlaw ingest --source mcl-files|mcl-xml-files loads chapter files saved by hand. Fixture text is prefixed [FIXTURE] and is not real law.

Quick start (fixtures)

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
export MLAW_DB=data/mlaw.sqlite3
mlaw ingest --source fixture --path fixtures/day1     # day 1
mlaw ingest --source fixture --path fixtures/day2     # day 2: one modified, one added, one removed
mlaw status
pytest
mlaw serve                                            # stdio, for Claude Desktop

Real chapter files (no network): save a chapter's HTML from its Download page (the HTML icon) into a folder and run

mlaw ingest --source mcl-files --path ~/Desktop/MCL/chapters     # every *.html holding a chapter is loaded
mlaw status                                                        # shows the site's "Complete Through PA n of year" stamp

Or the Legislature's own XML (save Chapter N.xml files, e.g. via the site's "Download Chapter" link or the directory listing):

mlaw ingest --source mcl-xml-files --path ~/Desktop/MCL     # every Chapter *.xml is loaded

A run over some chapters only touches those chapters: sections missing from a loaded chapter are marked removed, everything else in the database is left alone. Live crawl (permitted by the Legislature; set a real contact in the user agent and MLAW_ROBOTS_ERROR_OK=1, since robots.txt returns an error): MLAW_ROBOTS_ERROR_OK=1 MLAW_USER_AGENT="north-coast-legal-mlaw/0.1 (mike@thenorthcoastlegal.com)" mlaw ingest --source mcl-xml-web (all chapters, discovered from the directory listing, 2 s between requests; --source mcl-web is the HTML equivalent) or --path "37 38" for specific chapters.

Claude Desktop (stdio) config:

{ "mcpServers": { "michigan-law": {
    "command": "/path/to/.venv/bin/mlaw", "args": ["serve"],
    "env": { "MLAW_DB": "/path/to/data/mlaw.sqlite3" } } } }

Remote (team) mode: mlaw serve --transport http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000 behind TLS (deploy/Caddyfile.example), with MLAW_BEARER_TOKEN set. Endpoint /mcp, health check /healthz. The bearer token is a stopgap; check which auth schemes Claude's custom-connector flow accepts for remote servers before rollout. Updates: deploy/mlaw-feed-refresh.{service,timer} polls the real MCLupdate.xml feed hourly and re-fetches live, via MclXmlWebSource, only the chapters it flags; deploy/mlaw-ingest.{service,timer} runs underneath it as a nightly full-crawl safety net (unrestricted mcl-xml-web, 04:30 America/Detroit). See "Feed-driven refresh" below.

Related MCP server: michigan-code

What the source site looks like (from saved pages and the full updates feed)

• Hierarchy: chapter (or chapter group, e.g. mcl-chapters-760-777) -> act or E.R.O. (mcl-Act-175-of-1927) -> division (mcl-175-1927-II, description carries its citation range "(762.1...762.16)") -> section (Home/GetObject?objectName=mcl-750-83). Initiated laws also exist.

• Every page shows a currency banner, "Michigan Compiled Laws Complete Through PA 91 of 2026". That is the site's own freshness stamp; mclsite.parse_currency reads it.

• Every level has a "Download ..." link to Home/Document?objectName=.... For a section that page offers an HTML rendering (Home/RenderDoc?objectName=...) and a static PDF at a predictable path (documents/mcl/pdf/MCL-750-145P.pdf, upper-case). The chapter-level download page (Home/Document?objectName=mcl-chap37) offers the same pair for a whole chapter (Home/RenderDoc?objectName=mcl-chap37, documents/mcl/pdf/MCL-CHAP37.pdf) and has Previous/Next Document links, so the chapters can be walked without an index. If the chapter-level HTML holds every section with usable structure, the full MCL is a few hundred requests instead of tens of thousands. The RenderDoc HTML for a chapter has not been seen yet; the statute-level download page is still unseen too.

• Daily Bill Status Report (Home/DailyBillStatus?dateFrom=…&dateTo=…): bills grouped by stage (Introduced, Passed by Chamber, Enrolled, Adopted; others may exist) with one-line descriptions such as "Amends sec. 9 of 1972 PA 348 (MCL 554.609)". billstatus.py parses it into rows with the statutes each bill touches. This is pending legislation, not law; the plan is a clearly-labelled pending_legislation tool, never mixed into text.

• Section pages: catchline heading (750.145p Caregiver, ...), body paragraphs beginning "Sec. 145p.", then labeled notes ("History:", "Compiler's Notes:"). A repealed section keeps its status in the heading ("Repealed. 2010, Act 96, Imd. Eff. June 22, 2010.") and may have no body. Division pages list their sections with catchlines. Statutes cite each other as "being section 400.11b of the Michigan Compiled Laws", which the cross-reference extractor understands.

• The footer links the three RSS feeds (bills, meetings, laws) and an Acceptable Use Policy at /Home/AcceptableUse. Its four guidelines: respect copyright/licence in the data; do not use the Services in a way that "precludes or significantly hinders use by others"; do not violate laws; respect others' privacy. It does not mention automated access either way, so we crawl slowly, identify ourselves, and ask (see docs/lsb-inquiry.md).

• Variant nodes. The Legislature confirmed that .amended, .added and .new sections display changes made by laws that have passed but are not yet in effect (for example Section 2.13.new, added by PA 7 of 2026, takes effect 91 days after adjournment). mcl-333-16335-amended (saved page) is the same citation with a red notice, "THIS AMENDED SECTION IS EFFECTIVE JANUARY 22, 2028": future text next to the ordinary node that holds today's text. The bracket form (mcl-333-5474c[1]) was not addressed in the reply and stays unconfirmed. Note that .new sections have no ordinary node yet, so get_document must not say "not found" for them (to do). We store variants as separate rows, never in the search index, and get_document returns them under other_forms with the effective date and a caution. Whether chapter-level RenderDoc files include variants is not yet known (Chapter 37 has none).

• Tables sit inline inside a section (<table><tr><td> between paragraphs) and the next subsection can be a loose text node after </table>. An earlier version of the parser silently dropped that subsection; the section parser now visits every node and compares its output with all the text in the section, and a chapter whose sections fail that check aborts the run instead of storing truncated law.

• Chapter files also contain range lines for wholly repealed acts ("37.1-37.9 Repealed. 1976, Act 453, ..."); these are stored as ranges so get_document("MCL 37.5") can explain instead of saying "not found".

• Notes after the History line ("Compiler's Notes", "Admin Rule", "Constitutionality") are kept verbatim; the Constitutionality note (e.g. a provision held unconstitutional) is exactly what a lawyer needs to see.

• Act and section histories use a compact grammar ("Am. 1980, Act 506, Imd. Eff. Jan. 22, 1981") that history.py parses, including effective dates.

Update feed

mlaw feed --file saved.xml [--record] (or --url ...) parses the "MCL updates" RSS feed and can log its events to feed_events. Findings from the full 2026-09-02 build (2,410 items, saved as a regression sample): all one re-load of the Public Health Code (chapter 333): 2,209 section events, 137 heading nodes, 29 act-level deletions, 27 E.R.O. deletions, plus initiated laws and 26 variant nodes. Items carry only a catchline (no text, no effective date) and share one pubDate per build, so it is a batch id, not a change date. Volume is not a measure of legal change. The feed tells the daily job which sections and acts to re-fetch; it never edits stored text itself. Unknown title shapes are kept as unrecognized. Per the Legislature: items stay in the feed for one day (a missed day is a gap, so keep a periodic full refresh), "deleted" means only "removed from the website" (not repealed), and a modified document currently shows up as deleted then added instead of "updated" (they have logged a fix).

The XML directory (primary source)

https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/mcl/ is an IIS directory listing of one Chapter N.xml per chapter (241 files, 480 MB in total on 2026-09-21; largest Chapter 324 at 38 MB, Chapter 333 at 24 MB), plus pdf/, xml/ (2005) and archive/ (monthly snapshots, one directory per year 2013-2026). manifest.py parses the listing: one request tells the daily job which chapters exist and which changed (size or time differs from the last parsed copy), and vanished files are reported, never turned into repeals. There is no Chapter 764.xml to Chapter 777.xml; confirmed against a fetched copy that Chapter 760.xml (11.7 MB) holds them, via its own <MultiChapter>true</MultiChapter> flag -- one file declared "760" actually spans 760, 761, 762, 763, 764, 765, 766, 767, 767A, 768, 769, 770, 771, 771A, 772, 773, 774, 775, 776, and 777 (672 sections). Listing times have no time zone. Caution: file dates are per chapter and can be old (the saved Chapter 37.xml is dated 2026-02-06 while the site says it is complete through PA 91 of 2026) -- the files carry no currency stamp of their own, unlike the HTML rendering's "Complete Through PA ## of ####" banner, so MclXmlFilesSource/MclXmlWebSource always report currency=None. Rely on the directory listing's own modified time, or an occasional cross-check against the HTML rendering, for freshness.

mclxml.py parses MCLChapterInfo -> MCLStatuteInfo (one per act/E.R.O./resolution, and, for a variant section, a whole extra statute entry standing in for the amending act) -> MCLSectionInfo / MCLDivisionInfo, and the embedded pseudo-XML inside BodyText (Section-Number, Paragraph/Paragraph-Number/P, and an occasional literal <table> either inside a <P> or, seen only in Chapter 333.xml, as a direct child of <Paragraph> with no <P> at all). Verified byte-for-byte against the HTML parser on Chapter 37 (see Status above); Chapter 2 and the fully-repealed Chapter 131 exercise variants, tables, and the SectRef-names-an-extra-citation edge case; Chapter 760 exercises MultiChapter (one file, many chapters -- each section's own citation decides its stored chapter, not the file's declared one); Chapter 333 exercises .amended/.added/[1] variants, the direct-<Paragraph> table shape, and 1,883 editor's notes that are bare text with no embedded markup at all. Structured History/HistoryInfo/Legislation data exists in the XML (effective dates, PA numbers, session type) but is not yet consumed -- current text comes first, per plan; that data is there for the historical/as_of backfill later.

Real chapters parsed so far

robots.txt and permission

The Legislature replied on 2026-09-21 (docs/lsb-reply-2026-09-21.md): automated access is permitted, requests should be rate-limited to at most 1 per second (may change), storing and serving a copy is fine with no wording requirements, and they do not believe they serve a robots.txt (the 502 seen by hand is a gateway error). The crawler still fails closed by default; set MLAW_ROBOTS_ERROR_OK=1 to proceed when robots.txt errors. A robots.txt that does load is still honored. Requests are spaced 2 s apart (MLAW_MIN_INTERVAL, never below 2). Keep the reply on file; counsel should confirm the wording if the tool is offered beyond your own office.

Confirmed live, 2026-09-21 (with curl, independent of this project's own code): robots.txt doesn't actually return that 502 (or anything else) to an automated request -- it just hangs, 0 bytes, indefinitely. So PoliteClient gives that one probe its own short robots_timeout (15s default, separate from the main request timeout) rather than waiting out the full timeout to learn the same thing every single run. Both deploy/*.service units set MLAW_ROBOTS_ERROR_OK=1; if you're running mlaw by hand, you need it too.

TLS

A cloud fetcher, wget on a Mac, and this session's own WebFetch tool have all independently rejected www.legislature.mi.gov's certificate (issuer DigiCert G2 TLS RSA SHA256 2020 CA1: "unable to locally verify the issuer"), which suggests the server does not send its intermediate certificate. The crawler never disables verification. Set MLAW_CA_BUNDLE (certifi bundle plus the intermediate) or MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST=1. Confirm the cause with: openssl s_client -connect www.legislature.mi.gov:443 -showcerts </dev/null | grep -E '^ *(s|i):' (one certificate listed means the chain is incomplete).

Confirmed live, 2026-09-21: MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST=1 fixes this for a real Python httpx client, not just non-Python fetchers. truststore is now a base dependency (pyproject.toml), not an optional extra to remember.

Confirmed live, 2026-09-22, on Ubuntu (NUC deployment): MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST=1 does NOT fix this on Linux, even though it fixed it on macOS. truststore delegates to the OS's own certificate verification -- on macOS that's Apple's Security framework, which opportunistically fetches a missing intermediate via the certificate's AIA (Authority Information Access) URL and silently completes the chain. Linux's OpenSSL (what truststore sits on on Linux) does not do this AIA fetching, so the exact same incomplete-chain problem that macOS papers over is fully exposed there: SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED: unable to get local issuer certificate. On Linux, use MLAW_CA_BUNDLE instead (it's checked first regardless of MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST) -- build it once from the missing intermediate's own AIA URL:

# 1. Find the AIA "CA Issuers" URL for the cert the site actually presents:
openssl s_client -connect www.legislature.mi.gov:443 -showcerts </dev/null 2>/dev/null \
  | openssl x509 -noout -text | grep -A1 "CA Issuers"
# 2026-09-22: http://cacerts.digicert.com/DigiCertGlobalG2TLSRSASHA2562020CA1-1.crt (DER-encoded)

# 2. Download it and convert to PEM:
curl -s http://cacerts.digicert.com/DigiCertGlobalG2TLSRSASHA2562020CA1-1.crt -o /tmp/intermediate.der
openssl x509 -inform DER -in /tmp/intermediate.der -outform PEM -out /tmp/intermediate.pem

# 3. Append it to certifi's bundle to make a combined trust bundle:
CERTIFI_BUNDLE=$(/opt/michigan-law-mcp/.venv/bin/python3 -c "import certifi; print(certifi.where())")
sudo mkdir -p /etc/mlaw
sudo bash -c "cat '$CERTIFI_BUNDLE' /tmp/intermediate.pem > /etc/mlaw/ca-bundle.pem"

# 4. Point the crawler at it:
export MLAW_CA_BUNDLE=/etc/mlaw/ca-bundle.pem

DigiCert's intermediate doesn't rotate often, but if the server's issuer ever changes, redo step 1 to find the new AIA URL. Both deploy/*.service units set MLAW_CA_BUNDLE=/etc/mlaw/ca-bundle.pem for this reason -- a Linux deploy must build that file once (steps above) before the first run; MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST=1 is left in place too as a harmless no-op fallback (macOS deployments still get real benefit from it).

Tools

How it stays trustworthy

• Every response carries provenance (source URL, last confirmed, first observed) and an unofficial-copy notice. Confirm the notice wording against the source site's own disclaimer.

• Versions are kept whenever text changes. as_of answers "what had we observed by this date", not "what was legally effective"; history begins at the first ingest.

• A complete crawl that sees under 90% of previously known sections aborts and changes nothing, so a half-loaded site cannot look like a mass repeal. The daily job ingests into a copy of the database and swaps it in atomically; failures are recorded and shown by data_status.

• The crawler honors robots.txt (and fails closed if it cannot read it), identifies itself, rate-limits, and uses conditional requests. Set MLAW_USER_AGENT to include a real contact address.

To do, in order

1. Done, and confirmed live. Feed-driven refresh has a live path: refresh.refresh_from_web() and mlaw feed --url ... --refresh-web poll the real MCLupdate.xml URL and fetch flagged chapters live via MclXmlWebSource, exactly mirroring the offline --refresh-from path through the same atomic copy-and-swap. Cadence decided and deployed: feed poll hourly, full crawl nightly (deploy/mlaw-feed-refresh.timer, deploy/mlaw-ingest.timer). Proven with mocked HTTP (tests/test_refresh.py) and, 2026-09-21, against the real live site end to end (real feed parsed and resolved correctly, a real chapter fetched and ingested live) -- see "Live-wiring verification" below for what was confirmed and the two real bugs (plus one deploy-config gap) that verification caught and fixed. Read the equivalents for courts.michigan.gov.

2. Done. Cross-reference validation against 6 real chapters (750, 760-777, 333, 37, 2, 131 -- 3,994 documents, 2,383 MCL xrefs, 1,162 Public Act xrefs). Found and fixed two bugs in citations.py: a citation-list scan would sweep up an unrelated decimal figure (e.g. "MCL 257.625, 0.02 grams...") as a bogus "MCL 0.02" citation, since chapter "0" was never rejected; and Public Act citations written as "Act No. 267 of the Public Acts of 1976" or the bare "Act 368 of 1978" (the common form in real body text, alongside "1978 PA 368") weren't recognized at all. Both fixed with real-corpus regression tests. Zero false negatives found for MCL/MCR/MRE literal citations. Known, accepted limitation (not fixed, too rare/ambiguous to be worth it): a "being section 17766a of the Michigan Compiled Laws" clause with no chapter-number prefix (1 occurrence in the corpus). Follow-up done: the ranges-table gap this validation surfaced (item 3 below) is now closed too.

3. Done. ranges-table coverage gap closed. The compilers sometimes declare a span of sections repealed/expired in running prose rather than the act/chapter-level stub line _stub_ranges already caught from a LongTitle ("37.1-37.9 Repealed. 1976, Act 453..."): a whole section can BE a narrative repeal notice for a different span (e.g. MCL 333.13607: "Sections 13601 to 13606 ..., being sections 333.13601 to 333.13606 of the Michigan Compiled Laws, are repealed effective December 31, 1993"), or a Compiler's Note on some other, often unrelated, live section can say "Former MCL 750.85, which pertained to ..., was repealed by Act 266 of 1974" or "Former MCL 333.20701-333.20773 Expired...". New citations.extract_narrative_ranges() recognizes both shapes (39 real hits across the 6-chapter corpus: 2 in-body, 37 Compiler's Notes -- 35 single citations, 2 ranges) and both chapterdoc.py and mclxml.py now call it per section, feeding the same ranges table the act-level stubs already do. service.get_cross_references() now also checks ranges for an unresolved MCL reference and, when found, attaches a known_repealed_range field instead of a bare "in_database": false -- so an agent asking why a citation didn't resolve gets "the compilers themselves say this was repealed" rather than an unexplained miss. The two confirmed typos in the Legislature's own XML (a citation to a chapter/section number that never existed) still correctly show no known_repealed_range and remain genuinely unresolved, as they should -- this doesn't paper over real errors, only recognizes real, compiler-stated repeals.

4. Deeper structural verification of the .amended/.added/[1] variants confirmed in Chapter 333.xml, the way .new was verified against Chapter 2's state duck example.

5. Constitution, then court rules and Rules of Evidence (PDF), then Public Acts.

6. Historical/as_of backfill from the monthly archives (2013-2026) and the structured History/HistoryInfo data already sitting in the chapter XML, once current-text ingest has run cleanly for a while.

7. Hosting, auth, and rollout to the team.

Feed-driven refresh

MCLupdate.xml (the Legislature's own feed, rebuilt every 5 minutes per its channel description) reports database events, not law changes -- see feed.py's module docstring. feed.resolve_refresh_chapters() turns a batch of new events into the actual MCL chapters that need re-fetching: a section-level event names its own chapter directly; an act-level or heading event is resolved by looking up which chapter(s) that act's documents (or, for a fully repealed/expired act, its ranges stub -- both are checked, a real gap the first version had until it was tested against real data, see Status) currently occupy. Anything that resolves to nothing is reported as unmapped_acts rather than guessed at. refresh.py ties this to an actual re-ingest: MclXmlFilesSource gained a chapters filter so a refresh can point at one directory holding every chapter ever saved and only read the ones flagged (a MultiChapter file like Chapter 760.xml is pulled in whole if any one of its chapters is wanted, since there's no cheaper fetch unit). From the CLI, mlaw feed --file/--url ... --refresh-from DIR parses the feed, records new events, resolves the plan, and -- if it names any chapters -- re-ingests just those, through the same atomic copy-the-live-DB-then-swap-it-in mlaw ingest uses. Proven against the real 2,410-item feed sample and the real Chapter 333.xml: resolves to exactly ["333"] with zero unmapped acts, and a repeat poll of the same build is a true no-op.

Live wiring (2026-09-21): the same shape now exists against the live site instead of a saved directory -- refresh.refresh_from_web() and mlaw feed --url ... --refresh-web build (or reuse, when --url was also used to fetch the feed itself) one PoliteClient and hand it to MclXmlWebSource with exactly the chapters the plan named. MclXmlWebSource's own former known limitation (a MultiChapter chapter requested by an explicit chapter list, e.g. the feed flagging "767A") is fixed too: _KNOWN_MULTI_CHAPTER_FILES resolves the request to the real file (Chapter 760.xml) and declares the file's whole real coverage up front, so this no longer fails even when the feed happens to flag a chapter living inside that file. Covered by mocked-HTTP tests (tests/test_mclxml.py, tests/test_refresh.py); see "Live-wiring verification" just below for what running this against the real site still needs.

Live-wiring verification

Confirmed live end to end, 2026-09-21, by Mike running it for real (from a session with no real internet access of its own, everything up to this point had only been proven with mocked HTTP or a browser -- see below for what that gap looked like and how it closed):

• MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST=1 (the truststore package, now a base dependency) does fix legislature.mi.gov's incomplete certificate chain for a real Python httpx client, not just curl/wget.

• mlaw feed --url https://legislature.mi.gov/documents/publications/RssFeeds/MCLupdate.xml --record parses the real live feed correctly and resolves it to the right chapter (refresh_chapters: ["333"]), matching the saved 2026-09-02 sample -- the feed hadn't actually rebuilt with new content since then, which is itself a useful data point (it rebuilds on real database changes, not on a fixed clock, despite what its own channel description implies).

• mlaw ingest --source mcl-xml-web --path "333" fetched the real, live Chapter 333.xml (~24 MB) and ingested it cleanly: 2,209 new documents, matching the live feed's own count for that chapter exactly.

• mlaw feed --url ... --refresh-web correctly reused one client for the feed fetch and the (in this case skipped, since no new events) chapter refresh, and correctly reported "nothing to refresh" rather than re-fetching a build already recorded -- the offline idempotency guarantee holds against the live feed too.

Two real bugs turned up along the way, both fixed:

• robots.txt doesn't error, it hangs -- confirmed independently with curl (0 bytes, no response, for as long as you'll wait), not just this client. PoliteClient now gives that one probe its own short timeout (robots_timeout, 15s default) instead of burning the full request timeout finding this out on every run against a new host -- see "robots.txt and permission" below.

• mlaw feed --url ... silently ignored MLAW_ROBOTS_ERROR_OK. The CLI built its own PoliteClient for fetching the feed URL, separately from the one a source builds, and only the latter ever read that env var -- so setting it had no effect on the feed fetch itself, which then failed closed exactly as if it had never been passed. Fixed (_client_from_env() in cli.py); mlaw feed --url ..., with or without --refresh-web, now honors it correctly.

A third issue was caught by inspection once the first one made it obvious to look: neither deploy/mlaw-ingest.service nor deploy/mlaw-feed-refresh.service set MLAW_ROBOTS_ERROR_OK or MLAW_USE_SYSTEM_TRUST at all, and neither set a TimeoutStartSec -- so, unfixed, both scheduled jobs would have failed closed on robots.txt in production, and even once that was fixed, systemd's 90-second default would have killed the nightly full crawl (8+ minutes minimum) and, before the 15s robots_timeout fix, the hourly job too. Both unit files now set both env vars and a generous TimeoutStartSec.

If you haven't yet: systemctl daemon-reload and re-enable both timers to pick up these unit file changes before relying on the schedule.