Related papers: Constitutional Precedent of Amicus Briefs
We explore the idea that authoring a piece of text is an act of maximizing one's expected utility. To make this idea concrete, we consider the societally important decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Extensive past work in…
We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court's public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two…
Most judicial decisions involve the interpretation of legal texts; as such, judicial opinion requires the use of language as a medium to comment on or draw attention to other language. Language used this way is called metalanguage. We…
Case Law has a significant impact on the proceedings of legal cases. Therefore, the information that can be obtained from previous court cases is valuable to lawyers and other legal officials when performing their duties. This paper…
Consider n agents forming an egalitarian, self-governed community. Their first task is to decide on a decision rule to make further decisions. We start from a rather general initial agreement on the decision-making process based upon a set…
We explore how ideas from infectious disease and genetics can be used to uncover patterns of cultural inheritance and innovation in a corpus of 591 national constitutions spanning 1789 - 2008. Legal "Ideas" are encoded as "topics" - words…
A crucial consideration when developing and deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) is the human values to which these models are aligned. In the constitutional framework of alignment models are aligned to a set of principles (the…
As the most public component of the Supreme Court's decision-making process, oral argument receives an out-sized share of attention in the popular media. Despite its prominence, however, the basic function and operation of oral argument as…
The count of pending cases has shown an exponential rise across nations (e.g., with more than 10 million pending cases in India alone). The main issue lies in the fact that the number of cases submitted to the law system is far greater than…
There is growing consensus that language model (LM) developers should not be the sole deciders of LM behavior, creating a need for methods that enable the broader public to collectively shape the behavior of LM systems that affect them. To…
A document which elaborates opinions and arguments related to the previous court cases is known as a legal opinion text. Lawyers and legal officials have to spend considerable effort and time to obtain the required information manually from…
Computational methods applied to legal scholarship hold the promise of analyzing law at scale. We start from a simple question: how often do courts implicitly apply statutory rules? This requires distinguishing legal reasoning from semantic…
Factors are a foundational component of legal analysis and computational models of legal reasoning. These factor-based representations enable lawyers, judges, and AI and Law researchers to reason about legal cases. In this paper, we…
From moderating content within an online community to producing socially-appropriate generative outputs, decision-making tasks -- conducted by either humans or AI -- often depend on subjective or socially-established criteria. To ensure…
Can foundation models be guided to execute tasks involving legal reasoning? We believe that building a benchmark to answer this question will require sustained collaborative efforts between the computer science and legal communities. To…
In common law, the outcome of a new case is determined mostly by precedent cases, rather than by existing statutes. However, how exactly does the precedent influence the outcome of a new case? Answering this question is crucial for…
We introduce PriCL: the first framework for expressing and automatically reasoning about privacy case law by means of precedent. PriCL is parametric in an underlying logic for expressing world properties, and provides support for court…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
This paper uses statistical analysis of function words used in legal judgments written by United States Supreme Court justices, to determine which justices have the most variable writing style (which may indicated greater reliance on their…
Arguments, counter-arguments, facts, and evidence obtained via documents related to previous court cases are of essential need for legal professionals. Therefore, the process of automatic information extraction from documents containing…