NeurJudge: A Circumstance-aware Neural Framework for Legal Judgment Prediction

Zero-shot Transfer of Article-aware Legal Outcome Classification for European Court of Human Rights Cases

“…Legal Judgement Prediction: LJP/COC as an NLP task has been studied using corpora from different jurisdictions, such as the ECtHR (Chalkidis et al, 2019(Chalkidis et al, , 2021(Chalkidis et al, , 2022bAletras et al, 2016;Liu and Chen, 2017;Medvedeva et al, 2020;SAYS, 2020;Medvedeva et al, 2021;Santosh et al, 2023) Chinese Criminal Courts (Luo et al, 2017;Zhong et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2019;Yue et al, 2021;Zhong et al, 2020), US Supreme Court (Katz et al, 2017;Kaufman et al, 2019), Indian Supreme Court (Malik et al, 2021;Shaikh et al, 2020) the French court of Cassation ( Şulea et al, 2017b,a), Brazilian courts (Lage-Freitas et al, 2022), the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (Niklaus et al, 2021), UK courts (Strickson and De La Iglesia, 2020) and German courts (Waltl et al, 2017) Early works (Aletras et al, 2016;Şulea et al, 2017a,b;Virtucio et al, 2018;Shaikh et al, 2020;Medvedeva et al, 2020) used bag-of-words features. More recent approaches use deep learning (Zhong et al, 2018(Zhong et al, , 2020Yang et al, 2019).…”

“…Luo et al 2017 used an attention-based neural network which jointly models charge prediction and relevant article extraction in a unified framework whose input includes the text of legal articles. Sim-ilarly, Wang et al , 2019bChen et al 2022;Yue et al 2021 employ matching mechanism between case facts and article texts. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to adapt articleaware prediction to the ECtHR corpus, which is situated in the in human rights litigation domain.…”

“…This work seeks to remedy this incomplete inference and enable the model to learn more authentic reasoning between rules and case facts by casting LJP into an article-aware classification setting and subjecting it to a zero-shot transfer challenge. Article-aware classification has been explored on Chinese criminal case corpora (Wang et al, , 2019bYue et al, 2021;Chen et al, 2022). Similarly, Holzenberger et al 2020 has modeled statutory reasoning by classifying US tax law provisions concatenated with textual case descriptions.…”

Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration

“…Legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict judgment results based on the fact descriptions automatically (Lin et al, 2012;Chalkidis et al, 2019;Yue et al, 2021;Xu et al, 2020;Niklaus et al, 2021;Malik et al, 2021;Lyu et al, 2022;Gan et al, 2022). The LJP methods in earlier years required manually extracted features (Keown, 1980), which is simple but costly.…”

“…Following the previous LJP works (Zhong et al, 2018;Yue et al, 2021;Dong and Niu, 2021), our experiments are conducted on the publicly available real-world legal dataset. To prevent any potential data leakage during the training of the LLMs, where the model may have already encountered the test cases, we create a new test set comprising cases that occurred after 2022.…”