The paper introduces the Profiling, Investigation, and Judgment (PIJ) benchmark, which contains 2,500 real homicide cases from five countries to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on pre‑arrest criminal investigation tasks. It assesses LLMs across criminal profiling, crime process reconstruction, and sentence prediction, revealing that performance drops as tasks require more implicit reasoning about unknown suspect profiles. The study finds that LLMs lag behind human experts, especially on inferential tasks like motivation and victim‑offender relationships, and exhibit biases in gender, age, and motive attribution.
By Yutong Yao, Yanjie Cao, Guanhua Chen, Xu Yang, Junchao Wu, Zeyu Wu, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
The paper introduces OBJECTION, an inference-time pipeline that adds an Adversarial Lawyer Agent to each of the three reasoning steps—offense, unlawfulness, and culpability—in legal judgment prediction models. By actively injecting defense arguments, the agent challenges the model’s default assumption of guilt, which is common in datasets biased toward guilty outcomes. Using a new Natural Innocent dataset of 3.4k real cases, OBJECTION reduces the False Guilty Rate from 82.93% to 16.69%, demonstrating significant improvement in substantive legal reasoning.
By Jaehoon Jeong, Jay-Yoon Lee
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.
By Utkarsh Soni, Syed Shariyar Murtaza, Yifan Nie, Sachin Chandrasekhar, Eugene Wen
arXiv:2607. 04261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is constrained by its reliance on post-hoc judicial materials, increasing the likelihood that models perform retrospective classification rather than true forecasting.
By Joe Watson, Joana Ribeiro de Faria, Marcus Tomalin, M{\aa}ns Magnusson, Huiyuan Xie, Hao Tian Yeung, Felix Steffek
arXiv:2608. 14610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal reasoning tasks such as legal judgment prediction (LJP) require identifying the temporally correct version of the law governing a case -- a capability we term temporal applicable-law determination.
By Yiqian Huang, Shuyuan Zheng, Qianying Liu, Shaowen Peng, Yuntao Kong, Kotaro Funakoshi, Chuan Xiao, Manabu Okumura, Yang Cao
arXiv:2506. 16150v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) advance, concerns about their misconduct in complex social contexts intensify.
By Xinyi Wu, Geng Hong, Pei Chen, Yueyue Chen, Xudong Pan, Min Yang
The paper introduces Juris Policy Optimization (JPO), a post‑training framework designed to enhance structured legal reasoning in Chinese criminal judgment prediction. JPO first trains models with teacher‑generated rationales to guide a four‑step reasoning process, then applies reinforcement learning using a composite reward that balances prediction accuracy, reasoning completeness, and cross‑step consistency. Experiments on several open‑source language models and three Chinese legal benchmarks demonstrate that JPO consistently outperforms both supervised fine‑tuning and standard reinforcement learning baselines in terms of judgment prediction and reasoning quality.
By Zhaolu Kang, Yantao Liu, Tailong Luo, Leqi Zheng, Lei Wei, Chenghua Zhu, Junhao Gong, Jiachen Qian, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Jiaxin Liu, Yuan Wang, Hao Zhang, Zixia Wang, Rong Fu, Zheng Lin, Richeng Xuan, Zhichao Hu
The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) can perform legally meaningful reasoning by testing OpenAI GPT 5.4 on European Court of Human Rights case forecasting. Using various prompting strategies, the authors find that the model produces structurally complete but substantively shallow analyses, and that LLM-as-a-Judge evaluators are internally consistent yet only weakly aligned with human annotators. The expert-curated prompt yields more comprehensive reasoning but does not improve prediction accuracy, leading the authors to caution against relying solely on automated LLM evaluation or using task accuracy as a proxy for reasoning quality.
By Amogh Raina, Ilias Chalkidis, Daniel Hershcovich, Henrik Palmer Olsen
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.
By Andrew Lou, David Shin
arXiv:2608. 10268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate legal determinations over what human rights are realized, and how.
By Savannah Thais, Wm. Matthew Kennedy, Abhigyan Acherjee, Matilda Wysocki, Malcolm Langford, Caitlin Kraft Buchman
The paper evaluates legal text classification models for Korean sexual offense cases, comparing traditional machine learning, large language models, and fine‑tuned domain models. Fine‑tuned KLUE‑BERT achieved the highest accuracy of 99.3%, outperforming GPT‑3.5, GPT‑4.0, and other traditional approaches. Explainable AI techniques were used to analyze predictions, revealing linguistic features that influence decisions and highlighting limitations in capturing subtle textual cues, especially in real‑world KICS data.
By Jeongmin Lee
arXiv:2606. 17478v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLMs acquire stronger reasoning capabilities, deceptive behavior becomes an increasingly serious safety concern.
By Kexin Chen, Yi Liu, Haonan Zhang, Yanhui Li, Xinyu Deng, Dongxia Wang