Legalize

Official connector for Legalize's open corpus of consolidated legislation — read a law as it stood on any past date, with the git commit behind the quote.

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Documentation

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.

Connect your AI client (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI…) to Legalize 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, 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. Claude asks you to confirm the address, then to sign in.

Claude Code (CLI)

claude mcp add --transport http legalize https://legalize.dev/mcp

Cursor

In ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "legalize": {
      "url": "https://legalize.dev/mcp"
    }
  }
}

VS Code (GitHub Copilot)

In .vscode/mcp.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

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "legalize": {
      "httpUrl": "https://legalize.dev/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Any client that speaks remote MCP works. If yours only speaks stdio, bridge it:

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, 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. 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 and 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:

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 and the server serves, without a token, at /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:

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 and from the list_countries tool.

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

About Legalize

Legalize 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 · MIT licence