German Legal MCP Server

German & Austrian legal research — one MCP server

⚠️ WARNING: Work in Progress
This project is currently under active development and not production-ready. APIs may change without notice, and features may be incomplete or unstable. Use at your own risk.

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for German legal research, providing unified access to multiple legal databases.

Supported Sources

Related MCP server: legal-text-mcp-de

Features

Bundes- & Landesrecht (legis:* tools)

• Federal and state legislation — BUND (all federal laws) + 16 Länder (all states)

• No authentication — free public access, no rate limits

• Unified interface — one set of tools for all jurisdictions

• Full text search — search across state legislation (Länder only)

• Resilient input — BUND accepts "§ 823", "823", "Art. 1", "Paragraph 51"

• Pandoc-compatible Markdown — clean conversion with Turndown

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

• Available states: BUND, BB, BW, BY, BE, HB, HE, HH, MV, NI, NW, RP, SL, SN, ST, SH, TH

Rechtsprechung im Internet (rii:* tools)

• Federal court decisions — BVerfG, BGH, BVerwG, BFH, BAG, BSG, BPatG (from 2010)

• Bavarian state courts — AG, LG, OLG, VG, VGH, FG, ArbG, LAG, BayVerfGH via gesetze-bayern.de

• No authentication — free public access

• Full text search — search across all federal court decisions

• Kurztext/Langtext — summary or full text via part parameter

• Randnummern — formatted as [Rn. 5]{.rn} (pandoc spans)

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

RIS Österreich (ris:* tools)

• Austrian federal, state & case law — consolidated Bundesrecht and Landesrecht (all 9 Bundesländer, or filter to one via bundesland; results tagged with their Bundesland), plus Judikatur (OGH/OLG/LG via Justiz; VwGH, VfGH, BVwG and others via the court filter)

  • Note: bundesland on application="landesrecht" returns that state's consolidated law (LrKons). Case law is a separate application — for raw state judikatur use application="judikatur" with the appropriate court (e.g. Lvwg for a Landesverwaltungsgericht), not bundesland.

• No authentication — free public Open Government Data REST API (data.bka.gv.at/ris/api/v2.6)

• Latest-first — sort="date" for the newest decisions; Judikatur Rechtssätze link their full decision text (Entscheidungstext) for ris:get

• Navigate & read statutes — ris:toc law="ABGB" lists the §§ with headings; ris:get_norm law="ABGB" paragraph="1295" returns a single §

• Surgical retrieval — ris:get section=… returns only a Randnummer (Rn 5), an Rn range (Rn 5-9), a line range (lines:1-40), or a heading (Spruch) — all token-preserving

• Pandoc-compatible Markdown — Randnummern as [Rn. 5]{.rn} spans; document HTML converted with Cheerio + Turndown

• Structured metadata — Geschäftszahl, Entscheidungsdatum, ECLI, issuing court/organ

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

• ⚠️ Austrian law — for German case law use rii:*, for German legislation use legis:*

InfoCuria — CJEU (icu:* tools)

• EU Court of Justice case law — judgments, opinions, orders from CJEU and General Court

• No authentication — free public access via InfoCuria API

• Multilingual — documents available in all EU languages (default: DE)

• Flexible case lookup — accepts case numbers (C-476/17), CELEX numbers, or internal IDs

• Randnummern — formatted as [Rn. 5]{.rn}

• Partial content — section parameter for Rn ranges, headings, or line ranges

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

EUR-Lex (eul:* tools)

• EU legislation — directives, regulations, decisions, treaties (TFEU, TEU)

• No authentication — free public access via Cellar REST API and SPARQL

• Multilingual — documents available in all EU languages (default: DE)

• CELEX lookup — retrieve by CELEX number (e.g., "32016R0679" for GDPR)

• SPARQL search — search by title keywords, filter by resource type

• Partial content — section parameter for articles (Art. 5), headings, or line ranges

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

DIP Bundestag (dip:* tools)

• Parliamentary documents — Bundestagsdrucksachen (Gesetzentwürfe, Beschlussempfehlungen, Anfragen)

• Legislative processes — Vorgänge with status tracking and linked documents

• Debate transcripts — full text search across Plenarprotokolle (BT and BR)

• Full text retrieval — extracted text including Gesetzesbegründungen, with section support

• Public API key included — works out of the box (key valid until end of May 2027, override via env var)

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

arXiv (arxiv:* tools)

• Preprint search — search by keywords, author, title, abstract, or category

• Metadata + abstract — default response without full text fetch (token-efficient)

• HTML full text — Markdown conversion for papers from ~2024+ (LaTeXML HTML)

• PDF fallback — older papers without HTML return abstract + PDF link

• No authentication — free public API, no rate limits beyond ~1 req/3s

• Save to file — save_path parameter to avoid context pollution

nautos.de (nautos:* tools)

• DIN/EN/ISO standards — search and retrieve technical standards from nautos.de

• Two-phase document retrieval — outline (metadata + TOC) first, then sections on demand

• Automatic authentication — IP-based login (auto-detected), user-based login fallback

• Structured TOC — hierarchical table of contents with section IDs for navigation

• File cache — 30-day TTL, persistent across restarts (~/.local/share/german-legal-mcp/cache/nautos/)

• Save to file — save_path parameter to dump full document to disk

Install in Claude Desktop (one-click bundle)

The easiest way to use this server in Claude Desktop is the packaged MCP Bundle (.mcpb) — no Node.js, no npx, no config file.

1. Download german-legal-mcp.mcpb from the latest release.

2. In Claude Desktop open Settings → Extensions and drag the .mcpb onto the window (or use Install…).

3. Optionally set the DIP key or nautos credentials in the extension's settings — everything else works out of the box.

The bundle ships the public, no-authentication sources and is cross-platform (macOS and Windows, Apple Silicon and Intel) — Claude Desktop supplies the Node.js runtime, so a single download works everywhere.

Quick Start with npx

npx @metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp

or add your MCP client config (e.g., claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "german-legal": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@metaneutrons/german-legal-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Environment Variables

Provider Enablement

nautos.de Configuration

Authentication: IP-based login is tried first (requires GLMCP_NAUTOS_TENANT_KEY). If it fails and credentials are set, user-based login is attempted as fallback.

Tools

Bundes- & Landesrecht

Rechtsprechung im Internet

RIS Österreich

InfoCuria — CJEU

EUR-Lex

DIP Bundestag

arXiv

nautos.de

Two-Phase Document Retrieval

All document tools use a two-phase approach to avoid flooding the LLM context:

1. Outline — first call returns title, metadata, table of contents, and a preview

2. Section — request specific parts by Randnummer, heading, or line range (served from cache)

3. Save to file — write full document to disk, return metadata only

Section formats: "Rn 5", "Rn 5-12", "lines:100-200", or any heading text (fuzzy match).

Markdown Output

Documents are converted to pandoc-compatible Markdown:

• Randnummern: [Rn. 5]{.rn} (bracketed spans)

• Footnotes: ^[inline footnote text] (pandoc inline footnotes)

Development

npm test              # Run tests
npm run test:watch    # Watch mode
npm run test:coverage # Coverage report

MCP Inspector

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node dist/index.js

Commit Convention

This repo uses Conventional Commits enforced via Husky + commitlint.

Types: feat, fix, docs, style, refactor, perf, test, chore, ci, build, revert

Scopes: legis, rii, ris, icu, eul, dip, nautos, core, deps, config

Architecture

• Manifest-driven providers — startup, help, shutdown and public/private distribution use one checked provider manifest

• Cheerio + Turndown for HTML → pandoc Markdown conversion

• Zod for input validation

• Axios for HTTP requests (Legis, RII, RIS, InfoCuria, EUR-Lex, DIP, arXiv, nautos)

• Structured JSON errors — all providers return BaseError.toJSON() with code, userMessage, recoveryHint; Axios errors auto-wrapped; DNS failures fail fast

• Conversion validation — all HTML→Markdown providers validate output is non-empty; detects upstream layout changes early

• Tools namespaced by source (legis:, rii:, ris:, icu:, eul:, dip:, arxiv:, nautos:)

License

GPL-3.0 - See LICENSE for details.