resolve_citation

Parses an Australian citation under AGLC4 (a case, a Commonwealth Act or instrument, or a Hansard debate), gives its canonical form, and resolves it to what Advisor holds: a decision's case_id, or a title and provision. Free.

A judgment is not legislation. Where a response names a Commonwealth title, the title carries a status block saying whether the Federal Register records it as in force today; a title not in force has no Advisor link, only its Federal Register link.

Note: case law has its own scope, terms and limits, and your service must keep them.

• Federal Court only. Advisor holds decisions of the Federal Court of Australia, cited FCA and FCAFC. It holds no other court's judgments, and no state or territory law.
• What is held, and the gap. Decisions to 4 March 2025, from the Open Australian Legal Corpus, and decisions from 23 October 2026, from the Court's own published pages. Decisions between those dates are not held yet. A citation to one resolves to unresolved_in_corpus: the judgment is not held, which says nothing about whether it exists.
• Reproduced unaltered, and attributed. Each answer carries attribution: "© Federal Court of Australia (Commonwealth of Australia). Reproduced unaltered under the Federal Court of Australia copyright licence." Keep it with any passage you show, and do not edit a quotation.
• Not the official report. Each decision carries source_url, the Court's page. Where an authorised report exists, it governs.
• How a passage was checked. anchor.label says how many independent sources a judgment's text comes from. Most decisions say "single source (OALC bootstrap; awaiting FCA Court HTML dual-source check)": no second source has been compared yet.
• What a paragraph number rests on. paragraph_structure and paragraph_structure_note say it: the Court's own page (court_html), the judgment's own certificate of how many numbered paragraphs it has (certified), numbering found with no certificate to check it (numbering), a numbered list such as orders that is not paragraph numbering (unnumbered: the judgment is held as one block, 0), or no numbering at all (unsplit, disputed). Where Advisor cannot confirm that a judgment's last numbered paragraph is one paragraph, paragraph_not_confirmed says so.

Parameters

Request (resolve_citation with {"text":"ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8) [2016] FCA 1023"})

Python SDK

import asyncio, os
from mcp import ClientSession
from mcp.client.streamable_http import streamablehttp_client

async def main():
    headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['LAWATLAS_API_KEY']}"}
    async with streamablehttp_client("https://advisor.lawatlas.ai/api/mcp", headers=headers) as (read, write, _):
        async with ClientSession(read, write) as session:
            await session.initialize()
            result = await session.call_tool("resolve_citation", {
                "text": "ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8) [2016] FCA 1023"
            })
            print(result.content[0].text)

asyncio.run(main())

curl

curl -s https://advisor.lawatlas.ai/api/mcp \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LAWATLAS_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"resolve_citation","arguments":{"text":"ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8) [2016] FCA 1023"}}}'

Response, as Advisor returned it on 8 November 2026. The tool's result is the JSON text of result.content[0].text; lists and long text are trimmed where marked "...".

{
  "parsed": true,
  "kind": "case",
  "canonical": "*ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8)* [2016] FCA 1023",
  "canonical_plain": "ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8) [2016] FCA 1023",
  "canonical_html": "<i>ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8)</i> [2016] FCA 1023",
  "structured": {
    "kind": "case",
    "case_name": "ASIC v Cassimatis (No 8)",
    "year": 2016,
    "neutral_court": "FCA",
    "neutral_number": 1023,
    "reports": [],
    "pinpoints": [],
    "judges": [],
    "popular_name": null,
    "court_parenthetical": null,
    "decision_date": "2016-08-26",
    "target_case_id": "767d3af3-c6d8-48e8-a187-3d0703d0603d"
  },
  "resolved": true,
  "resolution_status": "resolved",
  "target": {
    "kind": "case",
    "case_id": "767d3af3-c6d8-48e8-a187-3d0703d0603d",
    "neutral_citation": "[2016] FCA 1023",
    "case_name": "Australian Securities and Investments Commission v Cassimatis (No 8)",
    "decision_date": "2016-08-26",
    "para_num": null,
    "advisor_url": "/c/FCA/2016/1023",
    "source_url": "https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/single/2016/2016fca1023"
  },
  "schema_version": "3.10",
  "tool": "resolve_citation"
}

Notes

• Not held is not the same as not existing. A Federal Court decision Advisor does not hold, or a court whose judgments it does not hold, resolves to unresolved_in_corpus.
• A title not in force is named with its status and Federal Register link, never its text.