Legal Reasoning Is Not Lawyering: Rethinking Legal Benchmarks for Pro Se Access to Justice
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. We argue that current benchmarks are not equipped to support this assumption because they evaluate legal reasoning over inputs that have already been preprocessed by legal experts, which measures the upper bound of model performance. Access to justice depends on a lower bound: how models perform when inputs come from pro se litigants, whose prompts may contain noisy narratives, buried facts, omissions, folk-legal assumptions, and surface-level errors. These degradations...
| Authors | Andrew Lou, David Shin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 16 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 June 2026 |
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