Papers › LePaRD: A Large-Scale Dataset of Judges Citing Precedents

LePaRD: A Large-Scale Dataset of Judges Citing Precedents

15 Nov 2023arXiv:2311.09356archive 2025-07-28

Robert Mahari, Dominik Stammbach, Elliott Ash, Alex `Sandy' Pentland

We present the Legal Passage Retrieval Dataset LePaRD. LePaRD is a massive collection of U.S. federal judicial citations to precedent in context. The dataset aims to facilitate work on legal passage prediction, a challenging practice-oriented legal retrieval and reasoning task. Legal passage prediction seeks to predict relevant passages from precedential court decisions given the context of a legal argument. We extensively evaluate various retrieval approaches on LePaRD, and find that classification appears to work best. However, we note that legal precedent prediction is a difficult task, and there remains significant room for improvement. We hope that by publishing LePaRD, we will encourage others to engage with a legal NLP task that promises to help expand access to justice by reducing the burden associated with legal research. A subset of the LePaRD dataset is freely available and the whole dataset will be released upon publication.

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