Cornell Wex MCP server

@pipeworx/cornell-wex

Cornell LII's Wex legal encyclopedia: plain-English definitions of 5,600+ US legal terms and doctrines, with each entry's related terms, topic categories and last-reviewed date, read live from law.cornell.edu.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

Tools

possession", "res judicata"): definition text, related Wex terms, categories, keywords, last-reviewed date and the entry URL. A miss returns found:false, reason:"nosuchterm" with suggestions from the same letter of the index.

• wex_define(term) — the definition of one term ("tort", "adverse

ranked by how many words match. Looks under the first letter of each query word (up to three index pages, fetched in parallel).

• wex_search(query, limit?) — entries whose titles contain the query words,

A–Z index, with the per-letter counts for the whole index.

• wex_browse(letter, offset?, limit?) — the entries under one letter of the

Auth

Keyless.

Licence — read this before changing the pack

LII's terms () place all content LII creates, which Wex is, under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5: "you may copy, distribute, and display this work, or make derivative works, so long as a) you give the LII credit; b) you do not use this work for commercial purposes; and c) you distribute any works derived from this one under the same licensing terms." So:

volume-bracket slot — because NC forbids charging for it;

• the gateway entry is zeroRated: true — 0 credits on every tier, no

url, obligations) and license_note, via attachLicense in @pipeworx/shared, because BY means the credit must be shown and SA binds the caller downstream too;

• every response leads with attribution, license (id CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5,

beyond the gateway's ordinary result cache (one day for this pack).

• each call is one live fetch of the entry or index page; nothing is kept

Bruce ruled this in decision #1973 (2026-09-14): "it's not commercial redistribution, it's just redistribution, for free." Fleet #1974.

Data sources

lowercased with spaces as underscores (adversepossession); a few carry dots or slashes (a.k.a., a/r). The article body sits in #main-content after the ; the trailing [Last reviewed in … by the Wex Definitions Team] paragraph is split out as lastreviewed, and the Keywords / Wex category lists that follow are returned separately.

• — one entry. The slug is the term

a–z plus 1, 3, 4, 7, 9). /wex/all redirects to /wex/all/a. Counts per letter are in the letter nav (5,608 entries on 2026-09-14).

• — the A–Z index (30 pages:

built over the index pages instead.

• /wex/search?keys=… renders no results server-side, which is why search is

• ?_format=json on an entry answers 200 with HTML, not JSON.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cornell-wex": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cornell-wex/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cornell-wex/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.