legal-text-mcp-de 1.0.0

Python MCP server and HTTP API for loading, validating, searching, and resolving German legal texts with source provenance.

legal-text-mcp-de

legal-text-mcp-de is a Python Model Context Protocol server and HTTP API for loading, validating, searching, and resolving German legal texts with source provenance.

It is local or server-side infrastructure: no SaaS, no billing, no accounts, no tenant model, and no legal advice. The runtime loads either the committed fixture packages used by fast CI or a generated production corpus package built outside Git. Official text comes from gesetze-im-internet.de for German federal laws and from EUR-Lex / Cellar for EU acts such as the GDPR.

No legal advice. This software returns text and structured metadata. It does not interpret the law, advise on it, or produce any legal conclusion. The maintainer assumes no liability for use in legal decision-making contexts.

Older internal documentation has been archived under docs-legacy/summary.md.

Status

Lifecycle	Pre-v1.0.0 public release in preparation
Versioning	SemVer 2.0.0 (stability contract starts at v1.0.0)
Licence	Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE
Upstream	Derived from floleuerer/deutsche-gesetze-mcp (MIT, preserved)

Features

• MCP tools for listing laws, fetching norms, resolving citations, full-text search, and source provenance.
• HTTP API (FastAPI) over the same runtime, with structured /health, /ready, /laws, /search, and OpenAPI endpoints.
• Provenance-first design: every law and norm carries source URL, fetch timestamp, content hash, and the parser path it traversed.
• Two corpus modes: committed fixture packages for deterministic tests and CI, or a generated production package built from official sources at runtime.
• No editorial bundling: this repository ships tooling, not legal text. Texts are loaded from official sources at runtime.

Quickstart

Run the MCP server with the committed fixture corpus

uv sync --all-groups

DATASET_PATH=mcp/tests/fixtures/normalized \
STRICT_STARTUP=true \
PYTHONPATH=mcp \
uv run python mcp/server.py

The default transport is streamable HTTP at http://localhost:8001/mcp.

Run the HTTP API

DATASET_PATH=mcp/tests/fixtures/normalized \
STRICT_STARTUP=true \
PYTHONPATH=mcp \
uv run uvicorn http_api:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080

Docker

The Docker image does not bundle legal text data. Mount a validated package at /data/legal-texts:

docker build -t legal-text-mcp-de .
docker run --rm -p 8001:8001 \
  -v /path/to/legal-text-package:/data/legal-texts:ro \
  legal-text-mcp-de

Data Sources

Source	Coverage	Reuse position
gesetze-im-internet.de	German federal laws	Public-domain-equivalent under §5 (1) UrhG
EUR-Lex / Cellar (publications.europa.eu)	EU acts (GDPR, AI Act, Data Act, …)	Reuse permitted under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU with attribution

No text from these sources is committed to this repository. The generated-corpus pipeline fetches them at build time and stores provenance in a manifest.

MCP Tools

See the MCP tools reference for the full surface. Highlights:

• list_laws(query?) — list loaded laws with optional metadata filter.
• get_law(code) — law metadata + normalised norm summaries.
• get_norm(code, norm) — return one structured norm.
• search_laws(query, codes?) — search normalised texts.
• resolve_citation(...) — resolve structured citations without legal interpretation.
• get_source_metadata(code?), get_source_limitations(...), get_corpus_coverage(), get_related_norms(code, norm).

MCP tools return JSON-compatible objects. They do not return double-serialised JSON strings.

HTTP API

Method	Path	Purpose
GET	/health	Liveness
GET	/ready	Readiness
GET	/laws	List laws
GET	/laws/{code}	Law detail
GET	/laws/{code}/norms/{norm}	Norm detail
GET	/laws/{code}/norms/{norm}/relationships	Relationship metadata
GET	/corpus/coverage	Corpus coverage summary
GET	/corpus/source-limitations	Source limitations query
GET	/search	Search
GET	/openapi.json	OpenAPI document

Article-plus-section paths must be URL-encoded:

/laws/egbgb/norms/art%3A246a%2Fpar%3A1

Documentation

Full documentation is published at klein-business.github.io/legal-text-mcp-de.

Quick links:

• Quickstart
• MCP tools
• HTTP API
• Operations: security, SBOM, cosign-verify, versioning, threat model
• Roadmap

Source-of-truth documents live in the repo: README.md, CHANGELOG.md, SECURITY.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, GOVERNANCE.md, NOTICE, LICENSE.

Development

uv sync --all-groups
PYTHONPATH=mcp uv run --group dev pytest mcp/tests -v

The full fixture-backed release gate:

PYTHONPATH=mcp uv run --group dev python scripts/verify_release.py

The public-flip readiness gate:

PYTHONPATH=mcp uv run --group dev python scripts/verify_pre_flip.py

Contributing

This is a pre-v1.0.0 repository preparing for public release. Contribution guidelines, code of conduct, and security policy land in the next phases of the public-release programme.

Verification (post-v1.0.0)

Each release is signed and accompanied by an SBOM and SLSA-3 provenance.

Cosign image signature

cosign verify ghcr.io/klein-business/legal-text-mcp-de:v1.0.0 \
  --certificate-identity-regexp 'https://github.com/klein-business/.*' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com

See Verify with cosign for SBOM and SLSA attestation verification.

Licence and acknowledgements

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See NOTICE for required attribution.

Derived from floleuerer/deutsche-gesetze-mcp (Copyright (c) 2025 Florian Leuerer, MIT). Upstream licence terms are preserved in licenses/MIT-floleuerer.txt.