Legal Research Agent

A small MCP server that gives students a Claude-based research assistant backed by real, citable, free legal sources — no Westlaw/Lexis login required:

• CourtListener (run by the nonprofit Free Law Project) — full-text US case law search and opinion text.
• Cornell Law School's Wex — a free, authoritative legal dictionary/encyclopedia.

Students connect to it as a remote connector in Claude.ai — no local install, no API keys of their own. You (the instructor) host one server; every student in the class points Claude at the same URL.

Tools it exposes

Tool	What it does
search_case_law(query, court, filed_after, filed_before, max_results)	Searches CourtListener's case law index. Returns case name, citation, court, date, a snippet, a link to the full case, and a cluster_id.
get_opinion_text(cluster_id)	Fetches the full opinion text for a case found via search_case_law. Requires a free CourtListener API token (see below) — without one it tells the student to use the link instead.
lookup_legal_term(term)	Looks up a term in Cornell's Wex dictionary. Tries the exact page first, then falls back to browsing Wex's alphabetical index for the closest match (handles typos/variants).

Every response includes its source URL so students can (and should) verify and cite the original.

1. Run it locally first (sanity check)

cd law
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python server.py

This starts a Streamable HTTP server on http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp. This step is just to confirm it boots on your machine — students won't run this themselves.

2. Deploy it somewhere it can stay running

Students need a stable URL, so this needs a real (if tiny) host — GitHub Pages alone can't run a Python process. Render's free tier is the easiest option and needs no code changes:

1. Push this repo to GitHub (see below).
2. In Render, New > Blueprint, point it at your GitHub repo — it will read render.yaml and configure everything. (Or: New > Web Service, build command pip install -r requirements.txt, start command python server.py.)
3. Deploy. Render gives you a URL like https://legal-research-agent.onrender.com.
4. Your MCP endpoint is that URL plus /mcp: https://legal-research-agent.onrender.com/mcp

Note: Render's free tier sleeps after inactivity, so the first request after a quiet period takes ~30-50 seconds to wake up. Fine for a classroom tool; worth mentioning to students so they don't think it's broken.

Getting a free CourtListener API token (recommended)

Unauthenticated search works out of the box at a low rate limit — fine for trying it out, risky for a whole class hitting it during an assignment.

1. Create a free account at courtlistener.com.
2. Go to your profile settings > API and copy your token.
3. In Render, go to your service > Environment > add COURTLISTENER_API_TOKEN = your token. Redeploy.

This also unlocks get_opinion_text (full opinion text requires auth on CourtListener's side regardless of rate limit).

3. Push to GitHub

git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-username>/legal-research-agent.git
git push -u origin main

(Nothing sensitive is in this repo — the token lives only in Render's environment variables, never in git, per .gitignore.)

4. Give students the connector URL

In Claude.ai: Settings > Connectors > Add custom connector, paste your /mcp URL from step 2. Once connected, students can ask things like:

"Find the case where the Supreme Court established the Miranda warning requirement, and give me the citation."

"What's the legal definition of promissory estoppel?"

Limitations students should know

• CourtListener is a large, reputable, but not-exhaustive free database — it doesn't have everything Westlaw/Lexis has, especially older or obscure state cases.
• This is a research aid, not legal advice and not a substitute for reading the actual opinion — always click through to the source.
• Wex is Cornell's own reference material, written for public education; it's a great starting definition, not a substitute for a case-specific legal argument.