@pipeworx/scotcourts

Scottish court and tribunal judgment search — Court of Session, High Court of Justiciary, the National Personal Injury Court, Sheriff Appeal Courts, Sheriff Court civil/criminal, and the Scottish Upper Tribunal chambers, from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), published from 1999 onward.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• search_scottish_judgments(query?, court?, from_date?, to_date?, page?, limit?) — searches the judgment index; returns title, court, judges, date and a document_link to the PDF, plus the true corpus match count.
• get_scottish_judgment(document_link?, query?) — resolves a judgment document_link (or looks one up by case name/query first) and confirms the PDF is actually reachable: HTTP status, content-type, size. Does not extract PDF text — SCTS judgments are PDF-only and no PDF-text-extraction dependency exists anywhere in this catalog; text_extracted: false is always returned alongside pdf_url.

Auth

Keyless. No API key, no cookie, no bearer token — verified live with a plain curl (no browser session) against api.pa.web.scotcourts.gov.uk/web/search.

Data sources

• https://api.pa.web.scotcourts.gov.uk/web/search (POST, JSON) — the judgment search index behind the client-rendered SPA at scotcourts.gov.uk/judgments/#/. Do not use scotcourts.gov.uk/search-results/?filterType=Judgments — that is the generic sitewide search (server-rendered HTML) and returns news articles and hearing/livestream pages mixed in with real judgments; it was ruled out as a dead end for this pack (fleet #2259).
• https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk<documentLink> — the judgment PDF itself. documentLink in the API response is relative; resolve it against this host.

Traps found while building this (fleet #2259 spike, #2262 build)

• The judgments SPA and the sitewide search are two entirely separate apps on two different hosts. The static bundle referenced from /judgments/ itself (/apps/scts-web-apps.min.js) is shared site-wide chrome and does not contain the judgments app's own logic — it is loaded dynamically at runtime, so the request shape was captured by driving the live page with devtools/a monkey-patched window.fetch, not by reading a static bundle.
• filters shape (proven live, both in-browser and via a bare curl):
  • Court: {"field":"Court","value":"<exact dropdown string>"} — values are NOT guessable from a court's common name (e.g. the dropdown says "Court of Session", not "Court of Session (Outer House)"). The full list is in COURTS in src/index.ts.
  • Date range: {"field":"AdditionalDate","value":"<from>|<to>"} — either side of the pipe may be blank for an open-ended range ("2020-01-01|" = from-only, "|2020-01-01" = to-only). Both forms verified live.
  • An unrecognised Court value does not error — it returns HTTP 200 with results: [] and pagination.count.total: 0, which reads exactly like "no such judgments" if not caught. This pack validates court against the known list before sending the filter.
  • The "Show more filters" panel behind the four basic fields (keyword, court, date-from, date-to) was not reverse-engineered — out of scope for this build; only what was proven ships.
• pagination.count.total is the true corpus match count; results.length is capped by the limit sent in the request. Surface total, never results.length, as "how many judgments matched."
• Coverage disclosure: this index is whatever SCTS has chosen to publish, from 1999 onward — not every Scottish judgment ever issued. Sheriff court and tribunal coverage is thin next to the higher courts. This is Scots law; England & Wales / UK Supreme Court / UK tribunal decisions are a different corpus (@pipeworx/uk-caselaw).

Quick Start

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