@pipeworx/cali-elangdell

CALI eLangdell Press's free, Creative Commons-licensed US law-school casebooks and course materials: 62 titles (torts, contracts, constitutional law, evidence, civil procedure, tax, legal research, property, criminal law …) with authors, topics, PDF/EPUB/Word download links on cali.org, and the exact licence read from each book's own front matter.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

Tools

• elangdell_titles(topic?, license?, limit?) — the catalogue, filterable by a topic word or a licence id/prefix; every response carries titles_by_license so the licence mix is visible.
• elangdell_search(query, limit?) — titles by words in the title, an author name or the description.
• elangdell_book(slug) — one title in full: downloads, suggested attribution, and the per-title licence as the license envelope.

Auth

Keyless. The pack serves from a curated allowlist (src/titles.ts); it makes no upstream call. Downloads link to CALI's own files.

Licence — the allowlist is the compliance story

Licence varies per title, and the bookstore pages do not say which: the only statement is inside each book. src/titles.ts was generated on 2026-09-14 by reading the front matter of every title on https://www.cali.org/the-elangdell-bookstore (64 listed): the EPUB where there is one, else the PDF, else the Word file. Each row records the file the licence was read from and the book's own "Suggested attribution format" line.

Licence read from the book	Titles
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0	33
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0	23
CC BY-SA 4.0	3
CC BY-SA 3.0	3

Two of the 64 are deliberately not listed (NOT_LISTED in titles.ts, with the reason): Civil Procedure: Pleading (2014), whose EPUB, PDF and Word files contain no Creative Commons statement at all, and CALI Lessons: A Guidebook…, which has no downloadable file. Where a file names more than one licence — cover-art and photo credits under other CC terms, or an EPUB metadata field left over from a prior edition — the row takes the licence in the book's own "This work … is licensed and published by CALI eLangdell Press under a Creative Commons …" sentence and says so in license_resolution.

Two things the brief assumed that the books contradict: Sources of American Law is BY-NC-SA 4.0 in its current (8th) edition, not BY-SA; the six BY-SA titles are Torts: Cases and Contexts vols 1–2 (4.0), Distance Learning in Legal Education (4.0), and three Evidence titles by Colin Miller (3.0: Rule 404, Rule 410, Selected Materials on the Law of Evidence).

Consequences (fleet #1974, decision #1973):

• zeroRated: true on the gateway entry — 0 credits on every tier — because the NonCommercial titles forbid charging. The BY-SA rows would not need it; requires_zero_rating on elangdell_book says which.
• Every response leads with attribution, license and license_note via attachLicense in @pipeworx/shared; list responses carry the strictest terms any row has (BY-NC-SA), elangdell_book carries the title's own.
• Nothing is ingested: no book text is retained, only the catalogue rows.

Data sources

• https://www.cali.org/the-elangdell-bookstore?page=0..2 — the catalogue (28 cards per page, three pages, some titles repeated across pages).
• https://www.cali.org/books/{slug} — a title's page: description, topics, field--name-field-ebook-downloads links. The book pages answer a browser User-Agent with an Anubis proof-of-work challenge (a JavaScript bot wall); they answer an honest non-browser UA such as PipeworxBot/1.0 (+https://pipeworx.io) directly. The pack does not fetch them at all; the survey did, one page at a time with a 1.5 s pause.
• https://www.cali.org/sites/default/files/… — the EPUB/PDF/DOCX files, no wall. The licence statement is in the OPF dc:rights field and the "Notices" page; when the two disagree the Notices page is the one that names the edition.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cali-elangdell": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cali-elangdell/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/cali-elangdell/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1576+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cali-elangdell": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-cali-elangdell"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-cali-elangdell

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Cali Elangdell data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT