Related papers: What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic…
Every legal case sets a precedent by developing the law in one of the following two ways. It either expands its scope, in which case it sets positive precedent, or it narrows it, in which case it sets negative precedent. Legal outcome…
Current legal outcome prediction models - a staple of legal NLP - do not explain their reasoning. However, to employ these models in the real world, human legal actors need to be able to understand the model's decisions. In the case of…
Judicial opinions once considered sound can lose relevance over time. Yet, little has been known, both systematically and at scale, about how judicial reasoning has evolved. Here, we analyze four million US court decisions from 1800 to…
Machine learning shows promise in predicting the outcome of legal cases, but most research has concentrated on civil law cases rather than case law systems. We identified two unique challenges in making legal case outcome predictions with…
Normative models are often used to describe how humans and animals make decisions. These models treat deliberation as the accumulation of uncertain evidence that terminates with a commitment to a choice. When extended to social groups, such…
To answer a question, language models often need to integrate prior knowledge learned during pretraining and new information presented in context. We hypothesize that models perform this integration in a predictable way across different…
This paper looks at a common law legal system as a learning algorithm, models specific features of legal proceedings, and asks whether this system learns efficiently. A particular feature of our model is explicitly viewing various aspects…
Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case's facts. Previous work on using neural models for this task has focused on Chinese; only feature-based models…
Judicial impartiality is a cornerstone of well-functioning legal systems. We assemble a dataset of 112,312 civil lawsuits in U.S. District Courts to study the effect of extraneous factors on judicial decision making. We show that cases are…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
Given a specific query case, legal case retrieval systems aim to retrieve a set of case documents relevant to the case at hand. Previous studies on user behavior analysis have shown that information retrieval (IR) systems can significantly…
We extend the formal framework of classifier models used in the legal domain. While the existing classifier framework characterises cases solely through the facts involved, legal reasoning fundamentally relies on both facts and rules,…
In common law jurisdictions, legal practitioners rely on precedents to construct arguments, in line with the doctrine of \emph{stare decisis}. As the number of cases grow over the years, prior case retrieval (PCR) has garnered significant…
We show that the incorporation of any new piece of information allows for improved decision making in the sense that the expected costs of an optimal decision decrease (or, in boundary cases where no or not enough new information is…
The significance and influence of US Supreme Court majority opinions derive in large part from opinions' roles as precedents for future opinions. A growing body of literature seeks to understand what drives the use of opinions as precedents…
Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices…
In many situations people make sequences of similar, but unrelated decisions. Such decision sequences are prevalent in many important contexts including judicial judgments, loan approvals, college admissions, and athletic competitions. A…
People routinely rely on data to make decisions, but the process can be riddled with biases. We show that patterns in data might be noticed first or more strongly, depending on how the data is visually represented or what the viewer finds…
In modern society people are being exposed to numerous information, with some of them being frequently repeated or more disruptive than others. In this paper we use a model of opinion dynamics to study how this news impact the society. In…
Legal disputes unfold through sequences of filings in which parties update their positions and may settle at any stage. Most computational studies of legal prediction, however, focus on adjudicated outcomes and treat cases as static objects…