`search_case_law`

Pack: court-listener · Endpoint: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/court-listener/mcp

Search the FULL TEXT of US court opinions by subject matter — “qualified immunity for police dogs”, “securities fraud scienter pleading standard”. Searches the full text of CourtListener opinions with no API key and no rate limit, and returns the most relevant opinion ids, a relevance score and how often each case has been cited; set include_snippets for a passage around the match, or call get_opinion to read the whole thing. Use this when you know the TOPIC. To find a case by NAME use find_case; by reporter citation use lookup_citation. Phrase queries need quotes.

Parameters

Name	Type	Required	Description
`query`	string	yes	Subject matter to search for. Quote phrases: “clear and present danger”.
`limit`	number	no	Maximum opinions to return (1-50, default 10).
`include_snippets`	boolean	no	Return a passage of text around the match for each result (default false). Costs one extra fetch per result, so leave it off when you only need ids.

Example call

Arguments

{
  "query": "qualified immunity",
  "limit": 5
}

curl

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/court-listener/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"search_case_law","arguments":{"query":"qualified immunity","limit":5}}}'

TypeScript (@pipeworx/sdk)

import { Pipeworx } from '@pipeworx/sdk';
const pipeworx = new Pipeworx();

const result = await pipeworx.call('search_case_law', {
  "query": "qualified immunity",
  "limit": 5
});

Connect

Add this to your MCP client config, or use one-click install buttons:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "court-listener": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/court-listener/mcp"
    }
  }
}

See Getting Started for client-specific install steps.

search_case_law