Scotcourts MCP server

@pipeworx/scotcourts

Scottish court and tribunal judgment search — Court of Session, High Court of Justiciary, the National Personal Injury Court, Sheriff Appeal Courts, Sheriff Court civil/criminal, and the Scottish Upper Tribunal chambers, from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), published from 1999 onward.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

— searches the judgment index; returns title, court, judges, date and a document_link to the PDF, plus the true corpus match count.

• searchscottishjudgments(query?, court?, fromdate?, todate?, page?, limit?)

documentlink (or looks one up by case name/query first) and confirms the PDF is actually reachable: HTTP status, content-type, size. Does not extract PDF text — SCTS judgments are PDF-only and no PDF-text-extraction dependency exists anywhere in this catalog; textextracted: false is always returned alongside pdf_url.

• getscottishjudgment(document_link?, query?) — resolves a judgment

Auth

Keyless. No API key, no cookie, no bearer token — verified live with a plain curl (no browser session) against api.pa.web.scotcourts.gov.uk/web/search.

Data sources

judgment search index behind the client-rendered SPA at scotcourts.gov.uk/judgments/#/. Do not use scotcourts.gov.uk/search-results/?filterType=Judgments — that is the generic sitewide search (server-rendered HTML) and returns news articles and hearing/livestream pages mixed in with real judgments; it was ruled out as a dead end for this pack (fleet #2259).

• https://api.pa.web.scotcourts.gov.uk/web/search (POST, JSON) — the

documentLink in the API response is relative; resolve it against this host.

• https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk — the judgment PDF itself.

Traps found while building this (fleet #2259 spike, #2262 build)

two different hosts. The static bundle referenced from /judgments/ itself (/apps/scts-web-apps.min.js) is shared site-wide chrome and does not contain the judgments app's own logic — it is loaded dynamically at runtime, so the request shape was captured by driving the live page with devtools/a monkey-patched window.fetch, not by reading a static bundle.

• The judgments SPA and the sitewide search are two entirely separate apps on

NOT guessable from a court's common name (e.g. the dropdown says "Court of Session", not "Court of Session (Outer House)"). The full list is in COURTS in src/index.ts.

• filters shape (proven live, both in-browser and via a bare curl):
• Court: {"field":"Court","value":""} — values are

side of the pipe may be blank for an open-ended range ("2020-01-01|" = from-only, "|2020-01-01" = to-only). Both forms verified live.

• Date range: {"field":"AdditionalDate","value":"|"} — either

with results: [] and pagination.count.total: 0, which reads exactly like "no such judgments" if not caught. This pack validates court against the known list before sending the filter.

• An unrecognised Court value does not error — it returns HTTP 200

court, date-from, date-to) was not reverse-engineered — out of scope for this build; only what was proven ships.

• The "Show more filters" panel behind the four basic fields (keyword,

is capped by the limit sent in the request. Surface total, never results.length, as "how many judgments matched."

• pagination.count.total is the true corpus match count; results.length

from 1999 onward — not every Scottish judgment ever issued. Sheriff court and tribunal coverage is thin next to the higher courts. This is Scots law; England & Wales / UK Supreme Court / UK tribunal decisions are a different corpus (@pipeworx/uk-caselaw).

• Coverage disclosure: this index is whatever SCTS has chosen to publish,

Quick Start

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.