Get Legislation Section
legislation_get_sectionGet the parsed text of a specific UK legislation section, along with territorial extent and in-force status. Essential for verifying which jurisdictions a section applies to.
Instructions
USE THIS TOOL WHEN you have a known Act / SI and want the parsed text of a specific section, with extent and in-force metadata.
Returns full section text, territorial extent, in-force status, and prospective flag. Content capped per max_chars (default 10,000, ~2,500 tokens) — raise for unusually long definition sections; check content_truncated in the response.
ALWAYS check extent — a section may apply to England & Wales but not
Scotland or Northern Ireland. Reciting a section without checking
extent is a recurring legal-research error.
Alternative: call read_resource(uri="legislation://{type}/{year}/{number}/ section/{section}") for raw CLML XML; use this tool when you want the parsed structured response instead.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| params | Yes | LegislationGetSectionInput. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| title | Yes | Section title or heading | |
| section_number | Yes | Section number, e.g. '47', '12A', 'Schedule 2' | |
| content | Yes | Plain text content of the section, possibly truncated per max_chars. Check content_truncated and original_length for full-text information. | |
| content_truncated | No | True if content was cut to fit max_chars | |
| original_length | No | Original plain-text length in characters before any truncation | |
| in_force | No | Whether this section is currently in force; None if unknown | |
| extent | No | Territorial extent: list of 'England', 'Wales', 'Scotland', 'Northern Ireland'. Empty list means unknown — do not assume full UK extent. | |
| version_date | No | Date of the version retrieved | |
| prospective | No | True if this section has not yet come into force; None if unknown | |
| source_format | No | Source parsed for this response. html_fallback means CLML XML was unavailable and text was parsed from the public HTML page. | xml |
| warnings | No | Non-fatal retrieval or parsing warnings the caller should disclose where relevant. |