@pipeworx/cornell-wex

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cornell-wex/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 3

Cornell LII’s Wex legal encyclopedia: plain-English definitions of 5,600+ US legal terms and doctrines, with each entry’s related terms, topic categories and last-reviewed date, read live from law.cornell.edu.

Tools

• wex_define(term) — the definition of one term (“tort”, “adverse possession”, “res judicata”): definition text, related Wex terms, categories, keywords, last-reviewed date and the entry URL. A miss returns found:false, reason:"no_such_term" with suggestions from the same letter of the index.
• wex_search(query, limit?) — entries whose titles contain the query words, ranked by how many words match. Looks under the first letter of each query word (up to three index pages, fetched in parallel).
• wex_browse(letter, offset?, limit?) — the entries under one letter of the A–Z index, with the per-letter counts for the whole index.

Auth

Keyless.

Licence — read this before changing the pack

LII’s terms (https://www.law.cornell.edu/lii/terms/documentation) place all content LII creates, which Wex is, under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5: “you may copy, distribute, and display this work, or make derivative works, so long as a) you give the LII credit; b) you do not use this work for commercial purposes; and c) you distribute any works derived from this one under the same licensing terms.” So:

• the gateway entry is zeroRated: true — 0 credits on every tier, no volume-bracket slot — because NC forbids charging for it;
• every response leads with attribution, license (id CC-BY-NC-SA-2.5, url, obligations) and license_note, via attachLicense in @pipeworx/shared, because BY means the credit must be shown and SA binds the caller downstream too;
• each call is one live fetch of the entry or index page; nothing is kept beyond the gateway’s ordinary result cache (one day for this pack).

Bruce ruled this in decision #1973 (2026-09-14): “it’s not commercial redistribution, it’s just redistribution, for free.” Fleet #1974.

Data sources

• https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/{slug} — one entry. The slug is the term lowercased with spaces as underscores (adverse_possession); a few carry dots or slashes (a.k.a., a/r). The article body sits in #main-content after the <h1>; the trailing [Last reviewed in … by the Wex Definitions Team] paragraph is split out as last_reviewed, and the Keywords / Wex category lists that follow are returned separately.
• https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/all/{letter} — the A–Z index (30 pages: a–z plus 1, 3, 4, 7, 9). /wex/all redirects to /wex/all/a. Counts per letter are in the letter nav (5,608 entries on 2026-09-14).
• /wex/search?keys=… renders no results server-side, which is why search is built over the index pages instead.
• ?_format=json on an entry answers 200 with HTML, not JSON.

Tools

• wex_define — Definition of a US legal term or doctrine from Cornell LII’s Wex legal encyclopedia: the plain-English explanation, its related Wex terms, topic categories and last-reviewed date. Answers “what does h
• wex_search — Find Wex legal-encyclopedia entries whose titles contain the given words, searched across the whole 5,600-entry index and ranked by how many words match. Use it when you do not know the exact term (e.
• wex_browse — List the Wex legal-encyclopedia entries under one letter of its A–Z index (5,600+ entries in total), with a URL for each. Useful for enumerating terms or paging through a letter; pass an entry to wex_