The paper introduces a sentence‑level benchmark for judging large language models’ ability to classify interpretive canons used by the German Federal Constitutional Court, based on Larenz’s framework. It operationalizes these canons as classification criteria, provides a dataset of court decisions annotated at the sentence level, and evaluates four LLMs with both expert hand‑written prompts and prompts optimized via Genetic‑Pareto. The results show mean F1 scores between 70.4 and 79.2, with grammatical interpretation being the easiest and systematic interpretation the hardest, and indicate that expert prompts already offer a strong baseline.
arXiv:2608. 08830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal Statute Prediction (LSP) involves automatically identifying relevant legal statutes given factual descriptions in legal documents, typically framed as a multi-label classification task within natural language processing and information retrieval research.
arXiv:2606.09389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to real-world legal tasks, evaluating the reliability of their open-ended legal responses...
arXiv:2606. 06679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Court judgments are central to legal practice and jurisprudence, yet discourse analysis of Hong Kong judgments has received limited attention, owing largely to the absence of expert-annotated corpora.
Legal Research Bench (LRB) is a new benchmark comprising 413 open-ended U.S. legal research questions, each paired with a gold answer, supporting authorities, and a binary grading rubric. The study evaluates thirteen advanced language‑model agents using web search, case‑law search, page parsing, and retrieval tools, scoring responses only when all required criteria are met and cited authorities verify. Results show that even the best model, Claude Opus 4.8, achieves full correctness on only 42.9% of questions, with performance varying by legal area and task complexity, and no clear link between more tool calls or inference cost and higher accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 18699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored.
arXiv:2606. 23716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Legal AI benchmark research frequently invokes the assumption that large language models can improve access to justice, including for people who cannot access lawyers in order to understand and exercise their legal rights.
The paper introduces Tasks over Application Manuals (TAM), a benchmark designed to test long‑horizon procedural reasoning in large language models. TAM uses real‑world tasks from ICD‑10‑CM clinical coding and U.S. federal sentencing, requiring models to follow extensive, rule‑based manuals and perform interdependent steps to produce exact answers. Experiments with GPT‑5 and various prompting strategies show very low exact‑match accuracy—1% for coding and 15.5% for sentencing—highlighting a gap between current benchmarks and the ability to reliably follow complex procedures.
arXiv:2605. 28183v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the BenGER (Benchmark for German Law) dataset for evaluating LLM systems on subsumption-based legal reasoning in German law.
arXiv:2605. 21071v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) is shifting semantic search toward a question-answering paradigm, where users ask questions and LLMs generate responses.
The paper examines LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to assess AI-generated text, questioning the assumption that judgments are derived from reasoning over responses and rubrics. It finds that classifiers trained solely on rubric text can predict judge outputs, indicating that rubrics contain recoverable evaluative signals independent of the responses. Counterfactual experiments show judges often fail to adjust decisions when either the response or rubric criterion is reversed, raising doubts about the reliability of rubric-based LLM evaluation.
The paper critiques the common practice of stopword removal in legal text analysis, showing that standard stoplists actually degrade performance on binary classification tasks involving Supreme Court opinions. By exhaustively testing the removal of each of ~18,500 candidate words, the authors find that no stoplist—generic or optimized—outperforms a no‑removal baseline, and that models cannot predict which words are beneficial to remove. The study argues that inherited preprocessing defaults can distort the doctrinal and ideological signals that legal scholars aim to recover, calling into question the validity of such practices.
arXiv:2601.08654v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, yet frozen black-box models can interpret the...