Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Large Language Models In Zero-Shot Semantic Annotation Of Legal Texts, Jaromir Savelka, Kevin D. Ashley

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The emergence of ChatGPT has sensitized the general public, including the legal profession, to large language models' (LLMs) potential uses (e.g., document drafting, question answering, and summarization). Although recent studies have shown how well the technology performs in diverse semantic annotation tasks focused on legal texts, an influx of newer, more capable (GPT-4) or cost-effective (GPT-3.5-turbo) models requires another analysis. This paper addresses recent developments in the ability of LLMs to semantically annotate legal texts in zero-shot learning settings. Given the transition to mature generative AI systems, we examine the performance of GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo(-16k), comparing it to the previous …

Survey Says--How To Engage Law Students In The Online Learning Environment, Andrele Brutus St. Val

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The pandemic experience has made it clear that not everyone loves teaching or learning remotely. Many professors and students alike are eager to return to the classroom. However, our experiences over the last year and a half have also demonstrated the potentials and possibilities of learning online and have caused many professors to recalibrate their approaches to digital learning. While the tools for online learning were available well before March of 2020, many instructors are only now beginning to capitalize on their potential. The author of this article worked in online legal education before the pandemic, utilizing these tools and …

Automatically Extracting Meaning From Legal Texts: Opportunities And Challenges, Kevin D. Ashley

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This paper examines impressive new applications of legal text analytics in automated contract review, litigation support, conceptual legal information retrieval, and legal question answering against the backdrop of some pressing technological constraints. First, artificial intelligence (Al) programs cannot read legal texts like lawyers can. Using statistical methods, Al can only extract some semantic information from legal texts. For example, it can use the extracted meanings to improve retrieval and ranking, but it cannot yet extract legal rules in logical form from statutory texts. Second, machine learning (ML) may yield answers, but it cannot explain its answers to legal questions or …

Using Ai To Analyze Patent Claim Indefiniteness, Dean Alderucci, Kevin D. Ashley

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In this Article, we describe how to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to partially automate a type of legal analysis, determining whether a patent claim satisfies the definiteness requirement. Although fully automating such a high-level cognitive task is well beyond state-of-the-art AI, we show that AI can nevertheless assist the decision maker in making this determination. Specifically, the use of custom AI technology can aid the decision maker by (1) mining patent text to rapidly bring relevant information to the decision maker attention, and (2) suggesting simple inferences that can be drawn from that information.

We begin by summarizing the …

Exploring Diversity With A "Culture Box" In First-Year Legal Writing, Ann N. Sinsheimer

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Studying law is in many ways like studying another culture. Students often feel as though they are learning a new language with unfamiliar vocabulary and different styles of communication. Throughout their legal education, students are also exposed to a profession comprised of unique traditions and expectations. As a result, learning law takes time and energy. It can be both engaging and frustrating and may even challenge some of students’ values and belief systems. To ease her students’ transition to law school, the author starts her course each year with a “culture box” exercise, which encourages students to examine who they …

Sources Of Information On The Trans-Pacific Partnership, Barbara H. Garavaglia

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is a free trade agreement between 12 countries in the Asia Pacific region: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. The agreement, signed by the U.S. and other participating countries in Auckland, New Zealand on February 4, 2016, “promotes economic integration to liberalise trade and investment” and “bring economic growth” to the region and participating countries. One reason for the sense of uncertainty, unease, and concern surrounding free trade agreements in general and the TPP in particular is that the negotiations are not public and …

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

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A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Computer-Supported Peer Review In A Law School Context, Kevin D. Ashley, Ilya Goldin

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Legal instructors have been urged to incorporate peer reviewing into law school courses as a way to provide students much needed feedback. Peer review can benefit legal education, but only if law school instructors adopt peer review on a large scale, and for that, computer-supported peer review systems are crucial. These web-based systems orchestrate the mechanics of students submitting written assignments on-line and distributing them to other students for anonymous review, making it considerably easier for instructors to manage.

Beyond the problem of orchestrating mechanics, however, a deeper obstacle to widespread acceptance of peer review in legal education is the …

Empirical Research For Public Policy: With Examples From Family Law, Richard O. Lempert

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Perhaps more than in any other field, legal scholarship has aimed directly at influencing public policy. Hence, it is not surprising that empirical scholarship on law related issues often seems to have an agenda that extends beyond the common social science goals of adding to our knowledge base and understanding of human behavior to suggesting to policy makers and practitioners legal and administrative changes that will ameliorate problems they confront and, by the researcher’s lights, make this a better world in which to live.

Writing To Learn Law And Writing In Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration, Michael J. Madison

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This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on teaching intellectual property law, describes a method of combining substantive law teaching with a species of what is commonly called "skills" training. The method involves assessing students not via traditional final exams but instead via research memos patterned after assignments that junior lawyers might encounter in actual legal practice. The essay grounds the method in the theoretical disposition known generally as "writing to learn." It argues that students are likely to learn intellectual property law effectively if they learn to practice as intellectual property lawyers, and specifically to write as intellectual …

Computer Models For Legal Prediction, Kevin D. Ashley, Stephanie Bruninghaus

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Computerized algorithms for predicting the outcomes of legal problems can extract and present information from particular databases of cases to guide the legal analysis of new problems. They can have practical value despite the limitations that make reliance on predictions risky for other real-world purposes such as estimating settlement values. An algorithm's ability to generate reasonable legal arguments also is important. In this article, computerized prediction algorithms are compared not only in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of their ability to explain predictions and to integrate predictions and arguments. Our approach, the Issue-Based Prediction algorithm, is a program …

Capturing The Dialectic Between Principles And Cases, Kevin D. Ashley

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Theorists in ethics and law posit a dialectical relationship between principles and cases; abstract principles both inform and are informed by the decisions of specific cases. Until recently, however, it has not been possible to investigate or confirm this relationship empirically. This work involves a systematic study of a set of ethics cases written by a professional association's board of ethical review. Like judges, the board explains its decisions in opinions. It applies normative standards, namely principles from a code of ethics, and cites past cases. We hypothesized that the board's explanations of its decisions elaborated upon the meaning and …

The Narratives Of Cyberspace Law (Or, Learning From Casablanca), Michael J. Madison

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Cyberspace scholars have wrestled extensively with the question of the "right" metaphorical approach to the Internet, in order to guide legal and policy decisions. Literary theorists have wrestled with the perception that cyberspace undermines conventional ideas about narrative. This Essay suggests that each group could learn from the other. Cyberspace tells a better story than literary scholars believe, and the lawyers should pay more attention to the narrative attributes of cyberspace. To illustrate the argument, the Essay proposes a specific story framework for cyberspace: the film Casablanca.

Building A Foreign Law Collection At The University Of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960, Margaret A. Leary

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Ms. Leary describes the vision, energy, imagination, and techniques of the dedicated people who built an eminent foreign law collection at the University of Michigan Law Library. She also uses Michigan as an example to illustrate the development of libraries and librarianship nationally.

Introduction To "Books", Margaret A. Leary

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It's well known that graduate William B. Cook's generosity provided the Law School with its trademark Gothic Law Quadrangle. It is less universally known that Cook endowed the Law School with a trust to support faculty research, and had a strong interest in the nature of that research. He chose to call the library building "Legal Research" and to inscribe above the main entrance "Learned and cultured lawyers are safeguards of the republic." Cook often said that the lack of "intellectual leadership 1s the greatest problem which faces America," and he wanted this Law School to provide that missing leadership. …

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

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Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …

What Law Librarians Collect, Penny Hazelton

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No abstract provided.

The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary

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Federal appellate court records and briefs are significant to researchers in many disciplines, but academic law libraries are discarding them. Ms. Leary chronicles the demise of paper holdings in law libraries, the rise of microforms, and the contents and usage of the National Archives and Records Administration's files. She then derives principles for preservation strategies that may apply to other categories of legal material.

Law Books And Law Publishers, Arthur S. Beardsley

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There are indications that the depression, which has burdened us for the past five years, is slowly receding. In its wake will doubtless follow renewed prosperity with all the blessings of peace and contentment. A freedom from financial worry will replace the present fear, and money will be more plentifully earned and freely expended.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the problems encountered during this economic cycle will be soon forgotten. Will the members of the legal profession and the law libraries return to their former policies of, what has appeared to be, uncontrolled and ill-advised purchasing of the …

The Law School Library—A Library Of Research For Lawyer, Layman, And Legislator, Arthur S. Beardsley

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We will probably agree that the college or university as a seat of learning must develop and maintain library facilities commensurate with the standing before the world which the institution's progress has earned. The library, and of course we include the law school library, is one of the indices of an educational institution's efficiency, and as such, we expect it to grow and expand by adding to the richness of its collections, material of ever increasing importance and usefulness. We expect the college library to take the lead in gathering for future reference the materials valuable for research which, on …