jurisd-research

name

jurisd-research

description

Expert Australian/NZ legal research and AGLC4 citation using the jurisd MCP server. Use when finding cases or legislation (AustLII), looking up a provision offline, formatting or resolving citations, building a pinpoint, tracing who-cites-what, or producing an AGLC4 bibliography. Triggers on case law, legislation, "AGLC4", "pinpoint", "citator", "cited by", "bibliography", neutral citations like "[1992] HCA 23", or jurisdiction codes (cth/vic/nsw/qld/sa/wa/tas/nt/act/nz).

jurisd: Australian/NZ legal research

jurisd is an MCP server for AU/NZ legal research. It searches AustLII, fetches full-text judgments, formats AGLC4 citations, manages a local citation cache + bibliography, and serves offline recall from installed data modules. There are 12 tools; operation variants are picked via a mode/op/action/by discriminator, not separate tools.

Core rule: local first, live as fallback

When data modules are installed (check with list_data_modules), prefer the offline tools for deterministic, citable, no-network answers. Fall through to live tools when the module misses or no module is installed. The local tools return a typed not-found so you can tell a genuine miss from an error.

Need	Local first (offline)	Live fallback
Read a specific provision (s 18)	get_provision	search_legislation → fetch_document_text
Act outline / structure	get_act_structure	search_legislation → fetch_document_text
Who cites this case	find_citing	— (local module graph only)
Concept / natural-language recall	semantic_search_local	search_cases / search_legislation

Always check list_data_modules once at the start of a research session so you know which layer to lead with. Every local answer carries metadata.source = "local_module" with module name, version, and snapshot date; mind the staleness advisory.

The 12 tools

Live research

• search_cases — NL case-law search across all AU/NZ jurisdictions (AustLII, authority-ranked). method: auto/title/phrase/all/any/near/boolean; jurisdiction; sortBy auto/relevance/date; offset for pagination.
• search_legislation — same controls for legislation (method adds legis).
• fetch_document_text — full text from an AustLII URL (HTML, PDF via pdf-parse). Pass citeKey to also save a local source copy + freshness headers.

Citation + bibliography (AGLC4)

• resolve_citation — citation/case-name → authoritative source. mode: auto (validate neutral cite vs AustLII, else text search), validate (existence check only), search (text only).
• format_citation — AGLC4 formatter. mode: full (default), short, ibid, subsequent (needs footnoteRef), pinpoint (fetches a judgment and locates a para).
• cite — write to the local cache. action: add (default; assigns a biblatex cite key, returns AGLC4 string) or refresh_source (conditional-HEAD freshness check).
• bibliography — read the cache (no network). op: get, list (default), export (writes a .bib), cited_by (reads the local citation cache).

Local data modules (offline)

• get_provision — deterministic single-provision lookup (no embedding/ranking).
• get_act_structure — containment tree (Act → Part → Division → section/sched/clause).
• find_citing — offline citator twin, with each citation's provenance span. kinds: cites/considers (considers = stronger substantive engagement).
• semantic_search_local — local vector recall (bge-small, offline, no key); optional filter on jurisdiction/type/segment_type; k results.
• list_data_modules — introspect installed modules (coverage, counts, embedding descriptor, load status, snapshot, staleness). includeInvalid shows refused modules.

Decision guidance

• resolve_citation vs search_cases: if you already have a citation or a precise case name, use resolve_citation (it validates the neutral cite and hands back the canonical URL). Use search_cases for open-ended topic discovery.
• Who cites this case: use find_citing against an installed decisions module — it is offline, deterministic, and gives provenance spans. Coverage is bounded by the installed module; there is no live citing-cases source.
• get_provision vs search_legislation: a known provision (s 18, sch 2, reg 12, cl 4(1)) → get_provision. On a typed not-found, fall through to search_legislation then fetch_document_text.
• semantic_search_local vs search_cases/search_legislation: concept questions over installed corpora → semantic_search_local. Anything outside module coverage, or needing live/recent material → the live search tools.

AGLC4 citation workflows

format_citation modes:

• full (default) — combine title + neutralCitation + reportedCitation + optional pinpoint. style: combined (default), neutral, or reported. e.g. Mabo v Queensland (No 2) [1992] HCA 23 (1992) 175 CLR 1.
• short — short form using the abbreviated title chosen at first reference (e.g. Mabo); add pinpointPara or pinpointPage.
• ibid — back-to-back same source (Ibid), optionally with a new pinpoint.
• subsequent — title (n X) referring back to footnote footnoteRef.
• pinpoint — give a url (AustLII) plus a paragraphNumber or phrase; jurisd fetches the judgment and returns the located paragraph pinpoint. Add caseCitation to prepend the case citation to the pinpoint string.

Bibliography export: bibliography op=export writes a BibLaTeX .bib (defaults to <cacheDir>/<projectName>.bib, override with outputPath) and returns the bib text. Filter to one logical document with document. List/inspect with op=list / op=get.

Typical research flow

1. Orient — list_data_modules to see offline coverage.
2. Find authority — search_cases (topic) or resolve_citation (known cite/name); for a provision, get_provision first, else search_legislation.
3. Verify — resolve_citation mode=validate, or read with fetch_document_text.
4. Pinpoint — format_citation mode=pinpoint (url + paragraphNumber/phrase).
5. Cache — cite action=add to record the source and get a cite key + AGLC4 string; optionally find_citing (offline module graph) to pull who-cites-it.
6. Bibliography — bibliography op=export to emit the .bib.

Module management

• Discover/inspect installed modules: list_data_modules (refresh to rescan, includeInvalid to see refused ones and why).

• Install modules out-of-band via the CLI (kept off the tool surface so an LLM never triggers a large download mid-conversation):

  jurisd fetch-module <name> [--modules-dir DIR]   # download + sha256-verify + atomic install
  jurisd verify-module <name> [--modules-dir DIR]  # re-verify installed files vs manifest
  jurisd list-modules [--modules-dir DIR]          # list installed (incl. refused)
  

  legislation-cth is published as workingmem/legislation-cth on Hugging Face. It provides Commonwealth primary and secondary legislation, citation edges, unmatched citations, and local bge-small embeddings. fetch-module downloads the manifest and parquet files, verifies each file against the manifest sha256 values, and installs the module atomically.

  Advanced operators can pass --manifest-url URL only for an explicitly trusted manifest source. The sha256 checks prove files match that manifest; they do not prove the manifest's provenance.

  Install root defaults to ~/.jurisd/modules/ (override JURISD_MODULES_DIR). Local tools need optional @duckdb/node-api; semantic_search_local also needs @huggingface/transformers. Pin a specific module with the module arg on any recall tool.

BYOK note

All env vars are optional — with none set, both the live AustLII layer and local baseline recall work. semantic_search_local's baseline (pure local cosine, no key, no network) is always present. A domain-specialised rerank / extractive-QA slot activates only if a provider key is set and reachable (e.g. ISAACUS_API_KEY); it refines the local top-k, never replaces it, and silently degrades to baseline when the key is unset or unreachable (reported by the capability probe, never thrown in a result).

Gotchas

• Live tools hit the network and can be slow/flaky; prefer offline tools when a module covers the area.
• find_citing coverage is bounded by the installed decisions module — a miss means the module doesn't cover that area, not that nothing cites the case.
• For short/ibid/subsequent forms, title is the abbreviated name picked at first reference, not the full case name.
• pinpoint mode needs an AustLII url with paragraph blocks; if none are found it returns an error rather than guessing.