Software Engineering Methods For AI-Driven Deductive Legal Reasoning
This addresses the challenge of reliable AI-driven legal analysis for legal professionals and developers, though it appears incremental by adapting existing software engineering approaches to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of automating deductive legal reasoning using large language models (LLMs) by applying software engineering methods, showing how techniques like mutation-guided example generation and metamorphic property-based testing can enhance reasoning for complex statutes and enable new applications in automated meta-reasoning.
The recent proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has opened up new frontiers in computational law. An exciting area of development is the use of AI to automate the deductive rule-based reasoning inherent in statutory and contract law. This paper argues that such automated deductive legal reasoning can now be viewed from the lens of software engineering, treating LLMs as interpreters of natural-language programs with natural-language inputs. We show how it is possible to apply principled software engineering techniques to enhance AI-driven legal reasoning of complex statutes and to unlock new applications in automated meta-reasoning such as mutation-guided example generation and metamorphic property-based testing.