California Jury Instructions MCP server

@pipeworx/california-jury-instructions

Official California jury instructions as adopted by the Judicial Council of California — CACI (civil, e.g. "303" = Breach of Contract—Essential Factual Elements) and CALCRIM (criminal, e.g. "200" = Duties of Judge and Jury), current (2026) edition, full instruction text with Directions for Use/Bench Notes, Sources and Authority/Authority, and revision history.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1784+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

verdict form by number ("303", "VF-303"): instruction text, Directions for Use, Sources and Authority, Secondary Sources, revision history.

• caci_lookup(number) — full official text of one CACI (civil) instruction or

instruction or verdict form by number ("200", "VF-200"): instruction text, Bench Notes (incl. Instructional Duty), Authority, Related Issues, Secondary Sources, Commentary where present, revision history.

• calcrim_lookup(number) — full official text of one CALCRIM (criminal)

claim or charge by keyword ("breach of contract" -> CACI No. 303), across CACI, CALCRIM, or both. Title search, not full-text search.

• cajisearch(query, set?) — find the official instruction NUMBER for a

edition PDF links for either or both sets.

• cajieditions(set?) — current edition year/adoption date and archived

Auth

Keyless. This reads the Judicial Council's own published, public PDFs — not a third-party API, no registration of any kind.

Data sources

— CACI (civil), current 2026 edition, the single source for every caci_lookup response.

(criminal), current 2026 edition, the single source for every calcrim_lookup response.

• — CALCRIM

Council's own index page linking to both resource centers, current editions, and archived editions back to ~2019-2021 (surfaced via cajieditions, not text-extracted).

• — the Judicial

Why this pack bakes the index instead of fetching per call

Both editions are published as ONE full-edition PDF — CACI 2026 is ~3,560 pages/11MB, CALCRIM 2026 is ~2,680 pages/84MB. There is no per-instruction endpoint, and parsing either document takes tens of seconds even outside a Worker, so scripts/bake-index.mjs downloads and parses both ONCE (re-run when a new edition is adopted, roughly annually) into src/ca-ji-index-data.ts, which the gateway uploads to KV and injects as args._bakedIndex on first call per isolate — see that script's header and src/index.ts's top comment for the full mechanism (same pattern as south-dakota-code, hawaii-code).

shared/src/pdf-text.ts does not work on these PDFs. Tested directly against the real CACI PDF: it silently drops every inter-word space (this typesetter encodes word gaps as TJ-array kerning adjustments, not space glyphs — e.g. "Thiseditionof CACI includes...") and mis-decodes several ligatures (fi/fl -> "®", en-dash -> "±") via subsetted font encodings outside its documented scope. pdftotext (poppler-utils) reconstructs spacing correctly via real glyph positioning and is used instead — a build-time dependency only; the Worker never runs the bake script. Re-running it (to pick up a new edition) needs pdftotext on the machine that runs it (brew install poppler / apt install poppler-utils).

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.