Where Experts Disagree, Models Fail: Detecting Implicit Legal Citations in French Court Decisions
Applying computational methods to law at scale requires separating genuine legal reasoning from surface similarity. We study this through a concrete task: detecting implicit citations of the French Civil Code, where a court applies a statutory rule without naming it (a post-hoc question about the reasoning a court actually used). We release a benchmark of 1,015 passage-article pairs annotated by three legal experts. Our central finding is that their disagreement is itself informative: the third of cases the experts dispute are where models fail. Our best ensemble reaches an F1 score of 0.70 overall. Yet, two-thirds of its false positives fall on those disputed cases, a concentration that ...
| Authors | Avrile Floro, Tamara Dhorasoo, Soline Pellez et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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