mcp

# Legalize — the MCP connector for consolidated legislation

**What a law said on any past date, with the citation and the git commit behind it. Your assistant answers from the corpus instead of from memory.**

[![MCP](https://img.shields.io/badge/MCP-Streamable_HTTP-1f6feb)](https://modelcontextprotocol.io)
[![Read-only](https://img.shields.io/badge/tools-read--only-2ea043)](#the-tools)
[![Auth](https://img.shields.io/badge/auth-sign--in_required-f0883e)](#authentication)
[![License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-MIT-yellow)](LICENSE)
[![Web](https://img.shields.io/badge/web-legalize.dev-111)](https://legalize.dev)

Connect your AI client (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI…) to [**Legalize**](https://legalize.dev) and ask about legislation in plain language. Every answer comes back with three things a model cannot invent:

- 📜 **The text itself** — the whole law or one whole article, never a truncated fragment.
- 🕰️ **A date** — not only the current wording, but the version that was on the books on the day you name.
- 🔗 **A citation and a git SHA** — the commit in the public corpus that holds those exact bytes, so the other side can check the quote.

> **One remote endpoint:**
> ```
> https://legalize.dev/mcp
> ```
> Sign-in required. See it live at [legalize.dev/mcp](https://legalize.dev/mcp), which always shows the current coverage and allowance.

---

## Quick connect

It is a **remote** server (Streamable HTTP, stateless). Nothing is installed: you hand the URL to your client, and the client walks you through the sign-in the first time it calls a tool.

### Claude.ai · Claude Desktop (Connectors)

Settings → **Connectors** → **Add custom connector** → paste `https://legalize.dev/mcp`.

Or use the one-click link, which pre-fills the name and the address:
**[Add Legalize to Claude](https://claude.ai/customize/connectors?modal=add-custom-connector&connectorName=Legalize&connectorUrl=https%3A%2F%2Flegalize.dev%2Fmcp)**. Claude asks you to confirm the address, then to sign in.

### Claude Code (CLI)
```bash
claude mcp add --transport http legalize https://legalize.dev/mcp
```

### Cursor
In `~/.cursor/mcp.json`:
```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "legalize": {
      "url": "https://legalize.dev/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

### VS Code (GitHub Copilot)
In `.vscode/mcp.json`:
```json
{
  "servers": {
    "legalize": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://legalize.dev/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

### ChatGPT
Developer mode → Settings → **Connectors** → create a connector and paste `https://legalize.dev/mcp`.

### Gemini CLI and other clients
```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "legalize": {
      "httpUrl": "https://legalize.dev/mcp"
    }
  }
}
```

Any client that speaks remote MCP works. If yours only speaks stdio, bridge it:
```bash
npx mcp-remote https://legalize.dev/mcp
```

---

## The tools

**All read-only.** The connector cannot write anything, anywhere — there is no alerting, no subscription and no state to change. The full descriptions the model reads, with every argument and its type, are published verbatim in [`tools.json`](tools.json), which is generated from the running server.

| Tool | What it answers |
|---|---|
| **`list_countries`** | Which countries are in the corpus, and how many laws each one holds. |
| **`search_laws`** | Find a norm by words in its title or by its official number. Returns the `id` every other tool takes. |
| **`get_law`** | Read what a norm says today — the whole text, or one article of it. |
| **`law_at_date`** | What the norm said on a given day, with the git SHA behind that version. |
| **`diff_law`** | What changed between two dates, as a unified diff of the two texts. |
| **`reform_history`** | Which norms amended this one, when, and what each says it touched. |
| **`law_stats`** | How large a corpus is and how much it moves, before drilling into it. |

Every tool returns the same envelope — `data`, `citation`, `url`, `source`, `note` — and every result links back to its page on [legalize.dev](https://legalize.dev). A tool-level failure is a *successful* call whose `data` is a structured error naming what to do next, so the model can correct itself instead of guessing.

## Examples (ask your assistant)

- *"What did article 348 bis of the Spanish Companies Act say in March 2023?"*
- *"Has the French Code du travail changed on this point since 2020? Show me the diff."*
- *"Which norms have amended this law, and when?"*
- *"How much of Latvian legislation does Legalize actually hold?"*

## Authentication

**Sign-in required; there is no anonymous access.** Every call is tied to an account, and an unauthenticated request gets `401` with the `WWW-Authenticate` challenge that starts the OAuth flow.

Your client discovers the authorization server from `https://legalize.dev/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource`, registers itself dynamically, and sends you to sign in once in a browser. After that it holds the token and you never see the handshake again. No API key is pasted anywhere.

## Limits

There is a free monthly allowance and a per-minute burst guard. Neither number is written here on purpose — they would go stale the day either changes, and a README that quietly lies about a limit is worse than one that points at it. Both are stated, live, on [legalize.dev/mcp](https://legalize.dev/mcp) and [legalize.dev/pricing](https://legalize.dev/pricing).

What does not change: past the monthly allowance the connector answers `quota_exceeded` and stops until the month rolls over — nothing is charged and nothing is cut off silently. **Every country is included in every tier.**

## Before you quote it

Most of the corpus is **consolidated**: amendments are folded into the text, so what you read is the law as it stands. Some of it is not. A text published **as enacted** comes back flagged, with the norms that amend it named, and never as the law in force — but the flag is only useful if you read it before pasting the quote into a brief.

Three more limits worth knowing:

- A date resolves to what was **published** on or before it, not to what was **in force**.
- **Article boundaries are derived** by matching headings in the text, not published as structure by the source. Quote the anchor, and check the boundary before relying on it.
- Counts are of what Legalize has ingested, not of what the official gazette has published. A gap in the corpus is not evidence that a norm does not exist.

A body is never truncated: a law too large to send whole comes back as its table of contents with instructions for asking again, because half an article reads exactly like a whole one.

## For developers

Transport is **Streamable HTTP**, **stateless**. The handshake, unauthenticated, is the thing to check first:

```bash
curl -si -X POST https://legalize.dev/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list","params":{}}' | head -20
# 401 + WWW-Authenticate: Bearer ... resource_metadata="..."   ← correct: that is the handshake
```

With a bearer token from the flow above, the same request returns the tool list — the same one this repository publishes in [`tools.json`](tools.json) and the server serves, without a token, at [`/mcp/tools.json`](https://legalize.dev/mcp/tools.json).

## What is behind the data

Legalize builds one public git repository per country: every law is a Markdown file, and **every reform is a dated commit**. That is where the SHA in an answer comes from — it is a commit in a public repo, not an identifier minted for the reply.

Ask what the Spanish Companies Act said in March 2023 and the answer carries commit
`3b9aea8d5` of [`legalize-dev/legalize-es`](https://github.com/legalize-dev/legalize-es):

```
git show 3b9aea8d5:es/BOE-A-2010-10544.md
```

returns the same bytes. The connector reaches **every country Legalize publishes** — the live list, with the size of each corpus, is on [legalize.dev](https://legalize.dev) and from the `list_countries` tool.

## More

- 🌐 **Web:** [legalize.dev](https://legalize.dev) — browse the corpus, free, no account.
- 🔌 **This connector, online:** [legalize.dev/mcp](https://legalize.dev/mcp)
- 🧾 **REST API:** [legalize.dev/api](https://legalize.dev/api) — the same data over HTTP.
- 💶 **Pricing:** [legalize.dev/pricing](https://legalize.dev/pricing)
- 🛠️ **Pipeline and corpus:** [github.com/legalize-dev/legalize](https://github.com/legalize-dev/legalize) — open source.

## About Legalize

[Legalize](https://legalize.dev) turns official gazettes into git: consolidated legislation as Markdown, one commit per reform, one repository per country. This repository documents its **MCP connector** — the read-only surface an AI assistant talks to.

[legalize.dev](https://legalize.dev) · [MIT](LICENSE) licence