ca-leginfo-mcp

An MCP server for California statutes and legislation, built on the Legislature's official public bulk-data channel (downloads.leginfo.legislature.ca.gov).

Lets an attorney's AI tool:

• Verify statutory text from source — current text, history note, and effective date for any section of the 29 California codes or the Constitution
• Flag pending bills that would amend, repeal, or add a given section
• Retrieve legislative history — from a code section to its enacting and amending bills and their committee/floor analyses, back to 1993

Status

All four build phases complete (ingest pipeline, archives, MCP server, deployment). The server runs on Railway with artifacts in Cloudflare R2, rebuilt nightly (deploy/):

https://server-production-602d.up.railway.app/mcp   (streamable HTTP)

• ingest/ builds both corpus artifacts from the pubinfo bulk zips: current.db (~40 s nightly: current law + session, FTS, parsed bill→section refs, analysis text, sanity gate) and archive.db (4.7 GB, 18 sessions 1989–2023: 283k bill version texts, 371k text-extracted analyses, votes, vetoes, ~1M parsed section refs, per-session coverage matrix).
• server/ serves both over MCP (mcp 2.0): seven tools — section text/search, pending-bill flagging, bill lookup, analyses with full text, legislative history (initiative and constitutional-amendment aware), chapter→bill pivot. Every response carries extract dates and a source note; era gaps come back as explicit coverage statements. Run locally: ca-leginfo-server --current-db … --archive-db … (stdio; --transport http for streamable HTTP).
• deploy/ is the Railway + R2 layer: boot.py syncs the artifacts from R2 and serves (/health reports freshness); a nightly cron (nightly.py, 10:00 UTC) rebuilds current.db from the freshest pubinfo daily zip, gates it against last night's artifact, and uploads only on PASS. Simple per-client rate limiting on HTTP.

The feasibility spike that preceded the build is preserved in spike/ — see SPIKE_FINDINGS.md.

Data source

All data derives from the California Legislature's public "pubinfo" bulk downloads — the sanctioned distribution channel for this data (the capublic schema published at downloads.leginfo.legislature.ca.gov). No scraping is involved.

This is an unofficial convenience mirror. Statute text refreshes weekly (bills daily); every response carries its extract dates. For court filings, verify against the official publication.

Disclaimer

This tool retrieves law; it does not give legal advice.