search_legislationLABSCO SUMMARY
Swiss legislation becomes searchable at the level of the article, not the law.
The live tools answer which law is this - title search, metadata, full text, versions. The local database answers the harder question, finding the exact provision that defines a term or cites another article, which is where legal research actually spends its time.
What it is
A research layer over Fedlex, the Swiss federal law portal. Six tools query the Fedlex SPARQL endpoint live; five more run against a local SQLite copy built by an ingest step, which is what makes full-text and article-level work possible.
What you get
- Keyword search across law titles and abbreviations, and a paginated list of everything in force
- Metadata and full text for a law, addressed by SR number or ELI URI
- Every historical consolidation version of a law
- The law-to-law citation graph, and an article-to-article one that resolves to a named article of one act citing a named article of another
- Full-text search across article texts, and formal legal definitions looked up by term
- Swiss laws that implement or reference a given EU directive or regulation
- Statistics on the local database: counts, size, and when it was last ingested
Requirements
Node and a build step. The SPARQL tools work as soon as it is built; search_provisions, lookup_definition, find_eu_references, get_article_citations and get_db_stats need the local database, which the ingest command downloads and parses first. Every tool takes a language - French is the default, with German, Italian and Romansh alongside it.
Setup effort
Build from source
USE CASES
01
Finding the law behind a question you can only describe in words
Search titles and abbreviations for the concept, read the metadata to confirm it is the right instrument, then pull the full text in the language you work in.
02
Pinning down what a term means in Swiss law
Look the term up as a formal definition across all legislation, then search the article texts for the provisions that use it.
03
Tracing what an article depends on
Follow citations at article granularity rather than law granularity, so you land on the provision that matters instead of a statute to read end to end.
04
Checking which Swiss rules implement an EU directive
Name the directive or regulation and get back the Swiss laws that reference or implement it, then read those.
05
Reading a law as it stood at an earlier date
List the consolidation versions, pick the one in force at the time, and fetch that text rather than today's.
11 tools
Listed in project docs. Your client may show a different list.
list_legislationget_legislationget_legislation_textget_versionsget_citationssearch_provisionslookup_definitionfind_eu_referencesget_article_citationsget_db_statsBEFORE YOU INSTALL
What to know first
Tools you get
11 tools named in the project's documentation.
INSTALLATION
Connect your client
You clone and build this one yourself.
Server setup
TERMINAL
git clone https://github.com/loicvuilliomenet-boop/fedlex-mcp
cd fedlex-mcp
npm install && npm run build
npm run ingestMCP Clients
Claude Desktop
CLAUDE DESKTOP · JSON
{
"mcpServers": {
"fedlex": {
"command": "node",
"args": [
"<YOUR_PATH_TO_FEDLEX_MCP>/dist/index.js"
]
}
}
}Claude Desktop — prebuilt database
CLAUDE DESKTOP — PREBUILT DATABASE · JSON
{
"mcpServers": {
"fedlex": {
"command": "node",
"args": [
"<YOUR_PATH_TO_FEDLEX_MCP>/dist/index.js"
],
"env": {
"FEDLEX_DB_PATH": "<YOUR_FEDLEX_DB_PATH>"
}
}
}
}Run as HTTP server
RUN AS HTTP SERVER · TERMINAL
node dist/index.js --http
