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BAILII UK Case Law

Registre officiel Administration et juridique

Search UK case law on BAILII — court judgments with section extraction. Runs locally.

Code source Site web Documentation

Que pouvez-vous faire avec BAILII UK Case Law ?

  • "Search BAILII for cases about HMO licensing"
  • "Find recent whistleblowing employment tribunal cases"
  • "Get the summary of Chinn v Hoilund-Carlsen"
  • "What did the court hold in that case?"
  • "Show me the discussion section"

Installation

Ajoutez ceci à la configuration MCP de votre client (Claude Desktop : claude_desktop_config.json ; Cursor : .cursor/mcp.json ; VS Code et les autres utilisent la même forme « mcpServers »).

PYPI package bailii-mcp
Claude Code 
claude mcp add bailii-uk-case-law -- uvx bailii-mcp==1.0.1
Configuration JSON (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code) 
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "bailii-uk-case-law": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": [
                "bailii-mcp==1.0.1"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Documentation

Tirée du README du projet sur GitHub, actualisée chaque semaine. Les liens ouvrent GitHub.

Sommaire
  1. BAILII MCP Server
  2. Install
  3. Configuration
  4. What You Can Ask
  5. Tools
  6. Why Local?
  7. Notes
  8. Licence
  9. Author

BAILII MCP Server

Search UK case law on BAILII. Retrieve judgments with automatic section extraction (summary, conclusions, discussion, background). Runs locally — BAILII blocks cloud IPs.

Install

No install needed — uvx runs it directly from PyPI:

uvx bailii-mcp
Using pip
pip install bailii-mcp
bailii-mcp

Requires Python 3.10+.

Configuration

Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bailii": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["bailii-mcp"]
    }
  }
}
Claude Code
claude mcp add bailii -- uvx bailii-mcp
VS Code

Add to .vscode/settings.json or use the MCP panel:

{
  "mcp": {
    "servers": {
      "bailii": {
        "command": "uvx",
        "args": ["bailii-mcp"]
      }
    }
  }
}
Using pip instead of uvx

If you installed via pip install bailii-mcp, use "command": "bailii-mcp" and "args": [] instead.

From source
git clone https://github.com/paulieb89/bailii-mcp.git
cd bailii-mcp
pip install -e .

What You Can Ask

Once connected, just ask Claude naturally:

  • "Search BAILII for cases about HMO licensing"
  • "Find recent whistleblowing employment tribunal cases"
  • "Get the summary of Chinn v Hoilund-Carlsen"
  • "What did the court hold in that case?"
  • "Show me the discussion section"

Tools

ToolWhat it does
bailii_searchFull-text search across all BAILII courts. Returns titles, citations, and links.
bailii_get_judgmentRetrieve judgment text. Defaults to summary + conclusions (~5000 chars).
bailii_list_courtsList available UK courts (UKSC, EWCA, EWHC, UKUT, EAT, etc).
Section Extraction

Judgments are large (30-100KB). By default, only the summary and conclusions are returned. Ask for more if you need it:

  • Default: summary + conclusions (5000 chars)
  • Specific section: "show me the discussion" → pulls just that section
  • Full text: "get the complete judgment" → returns everything

Sections detected: summary, conclusions, held, discussion, background

Why Local?

BAILII blocks requests from cloud servers and datacenters. This server runs on your machine, so requests go through your residential IP.

For case law that doesn't need BAILII specifically, uk-legal-mcp provides case law via the National Archives API — hosted on Fly.io, no local setup needed.

This BAILII server is useful when you need:

  • Employment tribunal decisions (EAT coverage is stronger on BAILII)
  • Older cases not yet in the TNA database
  • Specific tribunals with better BAILII indexing

Notes

  • BAILII terms prohibit bulk downloading — use for targeted research only
  • Be reasonable with request rate
  • Section extraction depends on judgment formatting — not all judgments have clear section headers

Licence

Apache 2.0

Author

Paul Boucherat — building MCP servers for UK property, legal, and project controls.

Questions fréquentes

Qu'est-ce que BAILII UK Case Law ?

Search UK case law on BAILII — court judgments with section extraction. Runs locally.

Comment installer BAILII UK Case Law ?

Il s'exécute sur votre machine. Dans Claude Code : claude mcp add bailii-uk-case-law -- uvx bailii-mcp==1.0.1. Pour les autres clients, collez la configuration JSON de cette page dans leurs réglages MCP.

Faut-il une clé API pour BAILII UK Case Law ?

Son entrée au registre n'indique aucune clé ni secret obligatoire. Certaines fonctions peuvent tout de même demander un compte auprès du service auquel il se connecte.

BAILII UK Case Law est-il open source ?

Son code est public sur GitHub, mais le dépôt ne déclare pas de licence standard.

Qui maintient BAILII UK Case Law ?

Il est publié par paulieb89. AI.tn le référence sans le maintenir ni le recommander.

Issu du registre MCP officiel. Être listé n'est pas une recommandation : vérifiez le code et les permissions d'un serveur avant de lui donner accès à vos données.