BAILII Server

PyPI Install in VS Code

Search UK case law on BAILII. Retrieve judgments with automatic section extraction (summary, conclusions, discussion, background). Runs locally — BAILII blocks cloud IPs.

Install

Using uv (recommended)

No install needed — uvx runs it directly from PyPI:

uvx bailii-mcp

Using pip

pip install bailii-mcp
bailii-mcp

Requires Python 3.10+.

Configuration

Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bailii": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["bailii-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add bailii -- uvx bailii-mcp

VS Code

Add to .vscode/settings.json or use the MCP panel:

{
  "mcp": {
    "servers": {
      "bailii": {
        "command": "uvx",
        "args": ["bailii-mcp"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Using pip instead of uvx

If you installed via pip install bailii-mcp, use "command": "bailii-mcp" and "args": [] instead.

From source

git clone https://github.com/paulieb89/bailii-mcp.git
cd bailii-mcp
pip install -e .

What You Can Ask

Once connected, just ask Claude naturally:

• "Search BAILII for cases about HMO licensing"
• "Find recent whistleblowing employment tribunal cases"
• "Get the summary of Chinn v Hoilund-Carlsen"
• "What did the court hold in that case?"
• "Show me the discussion section"

Tools

Tool	What it does
bailii_search	Full-text search across all BAILII courts. Returns titles, citations, and links.
bailii_get_judgment	Retrieve judgment text. Defaults to summary + conclusions (~5000 chars).
bailii_list_courts	List available UK courts (UKSC, EWCA, EWHC, UKUT, EAT, etc).

Section Extraction

Judgments are large (30-100KB). By default, only the summary and conclusions are returned. Ask for more if you need it:

• Default: summary + conclusions (5000 chars)
• Specific section: "show me the discussion" → pulls just that section
• Full text: "get the complete judgment" → returns everything

Sections detected: summary, conclusions, held, discussion, background

Why Local?

BAILII blocks requests from cloud servers and datacenters. This server runs on your machine, so requests go through your residential IP.

For case law that doesn't need BAILII specifically, uk-legal-mcp provides case law via the National Archives API — hosted on Fly.io, no local setup needed.

This BAILII server is useful when you need:

• Employment tribunal decisions (EAT coverage is stronger on BAILII)
• Older cases not yet in the TNA database
• Specific tribunals with better BAILII indexing

Notes

• BAILII terms prohibit bulk downloading — use for targeted research only
• Be reasonable with request rate
• Section extraction depends on judgment formatting — not all judgments have clear section headers

Licence

Apache 2.0

Author

Paul Boucherat — building MCP servers for UK property, legal, and project controls.