Federal appellate dockets

Federal appellate dockets — the thirteen circuits, the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court. 2.2 million dockets. This is the case on appeal; the written opinion that results is in the court-listener pack.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1864+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

No API key.

What this is, and what it is not

Docket metadata: that a case exists, its parties, court, docket number, filing and termination dates, and assigned judge. It contains no filings — no complaints, motions, briefs or orders. Those are RECAP, a separate corpus that is not keyless.

An agent with this data knows a case was brought. It does not know what anyone argued.

Related MCP server: mcp-docket-alarm

Tools

Caveats

• Quarterly snapshot. Every response carries snapshot_date.

• date_terminated is 78.3% filled, so a missing date means not recorded, never still open. Responses say which.

• nature_of_suit is sparse — 14.8% corpus-wide, 30.5% in district courts. This can tell you a company is in federal court; it often cannot tell you what for.

• Party search matches a substring of the case caption, so a distinctive party name works better than a full caption.

Attribution

Data is CourtListener / Free Law Project, published under the Public Domain Mark. Free Law Project funds and maintains the corpus. If this pack is useful to you, https://free.law/donate/ is where that goes.

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/federal-appeals/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 1864+ 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/federal_appeal_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"party":"Oracle","limit":5}'

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

Run it from npm

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

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

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 Federal Appeals data" })

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

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT