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BAILII UK Case Law

Official registry Government and legal

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

Source code Website Documentation

What can you do with 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"

Install

Add this to your client's MCP configuration (Claude Desktop: claude_desktop_config.json; Cursor: .cursor/mcp.json; VS Code and others use the same "mcpServers" shape).

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

Documentation

From the project's README on GitHub, refreshed weekly. Links open on GitHub.

Contents
  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.

Frequently asked questions

What is BAILII UK Case Law?

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

How do I install BAILII UK Case Law?

It runs on your machine. In Claude Code: claude mcp add bailii-uk-case-law -- uvx bailii-mcp==1.0.1. For other clients, paste the JSON configuration from this page into their MCP settings.

Does BAILII UK Case Law need an API key?

Its registry entry lists no required key or secret. Some features may still need an account with the service it connects to.

Is BAILII UK Case Law open source?

Its code is public on GitHub, but the repository does not declare a standard license.

Who maintains BAILII UK Case Law?

It is published by paulieb89. AI.tn lists it but does not maintain or endorse it.

From the official MCP Registry. Listing is not an endorsement: review a server's code and permissions before giving it access to your data.