Translating Legalese: Enhancing Public Understanding of Court Opinions with Legal Summarizers
This work addresses accessibility of legal documents for the general public, but it is incremental as it applies existing AI methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of public understanding of judicial opinions by developing an AI pipeline to generate simplified summaries, showing in a survey experiment that these summaries improve comprehension and perceived quality, particularly for less educated respondents.
Judicial opinions are written to be persuasive and could build public trust in court decisions, yet they can be difficult for non-experts to understand. We present a pipeline for using an AI assistant to generate simplified summaries of judicial opinions. Compared to existing expert-written summaries, these AI-generated simple summaries are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. We show in a survey experiment that the AI summaries help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education.