arXiv AI

When Do LLMs Apply the Wrong Law? Diagnosing LLM Failures in Temporal Legal Reasoning

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Can LLMs Time Travel? Enhancing Temporal Consistency in Legal Agentic Search through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.25920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) augmented with agentic search capabilities show promise for legal reasoning, they overlook a fundamental constra...

By Wei Fan, Yining Zhou, Mufan Zhang, Yanbing Weng, Yiran HU, Tianshi Zheng, Baixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Jianhui Yang, Haoran Li, Yangqiu Song
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Can LLMs Reason in a Legally Meaningful Manner? A Small-scale Study on European Court of Human Rights Cases

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 Computation and Language
Aug 28

Legal Rule Induction: Towards Generalizable Principle Discovery from Analogous Judicial Precedents

The paper introduces Legal Rule Induction (LRI), a task that seeks to extract concise, generalizable doctrinal rules from analogous judicial precedents. It presents a reproducible pipeline for constructing LRI datasets and, using Chinese law, releases the first benchmark comprising 5,121 case sets (38,088 court cases) for training and 216 expert‑annotated gold test sets. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art large language models struggle with over‑generalization and hallucination, but training on the new dataset significantly improves their ability to capture nuanced rule patterns across similar cases.

By Wei Fan, Tianshi Zheng, Yiran Hu, Zheye Deng, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Haoran Li, Weixing Shen, Yangqiu Song
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

A Short Survey of Viewing Large Language Models in Legal Aspect

The paper surveys how large language models (LLMs) are being applied in legal tasks such as judgement prediction, document analysis, and drafting. It reviews the benefits of automation while highlighting legal challenges like privacy, bias, and explainability. The authors also discuss data resources for legal domain specialization and outline future research directions.

By Zhongxiang Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 11

PROSLEX: A Novel Dataset for Expert-Annotated Legal Statute Prediction for Indian Judiciary

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.

By Subinay Adhikary, Upal Bhattacharya, Vivek Kumar Singh, Anurag Sharma, Shubham Kumar Nigam, Suvasis Das, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Koustav Rudra, Kripabandhu Ghosh
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Legal LLM Hallucination Should Be Evaluated as Failure of Legal Warrant

The paper argues that hallucinations by legal language models should be judged as failures of legal warrant rather than mere factual or citation errors. It defines claim-authority warrant as a context-sensitive relationship between a legal claim and applicable, current authority, and proposes that evaluating warrant can uncover failures missed by traditional accuracy or citation metrics. The authors outline a pilot study, benchmark specifications, and a research agenda to assess whether legal AI systems’ claims are properly licensed by law.

By Maksym Taranukhin, Vered Shwartz
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Asking For An Old Friend: Diagnosing and Mitigating Temporal Failure Modes in LLM-based Statutory Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for legal research, but their fixed training cutoffs and reliance on static knowledge clash with the evolving nature of statutory law. This study introduces a benchmark of 312 expert‑validated, time‑sensitive German statutory QA pairs that examine two temporal failure modes: post‑cutoff staleness and recency bias. Five LLMs were evaluated under four inference settings, and the results show that retrieval‑augmented approaches that enforce temporal validity significantly improve performance, while web search yields unstable gains and a pronounced recency bias.

By Max Prior, Andreas Schultz, Matthias Grabmair