3 ms·
The premise seems flawed. From the paper: “we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges” That presu
by swisniewski 8mo ago
The premise seems flawed.
From the paper:
“we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges”
That presupposes that a “legally correct” outcome exists
The Common Law, which is the foundation of federal law and the law of 49/50 states, is a “bottom up” legal system.
Legal principals flow from the specific to the general. That is, judges decided specific cases based on the merits of that individual case. General principles are derived from lots of specific examples.
This is different from the Civil Law used in most of Europe, which is top-down. Rulings in specific cases are derived from statutory principles.
In the US system, there isn’t really a “correct legal outcome”.
Common Law heavily relies on “Juris Prudence”. That is, we have a system that defers to the opinions of “important people”.
So, there isn’t a “correct” legal outcome.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- TZubiri 8mo agoSo judge rulings are the ground truth. Remember the article that described LLMs as lossy compression and warned that if LLM output dominated the training set, it would lead to accumulated lossiness? Like a jpeg of a jpeg
- stinkbeetle 8mo agoI don't think that common law doctrine applies here though. The facts of any particular case always apply to that specific case no matter what the system. It is the application of the law to those facts which is where they differ, and in common law systems lower courts almost never break new ground in terms of the law. Judges almost always have precedent, and following that is the "legally correct" outcome.
- arctic-true 8mo agoChoice-of-law is also generally a statutory issue, so common law is not generally a factor - if every case ever decided was contrary to the statute, the statute would still be correct.
- unyttigfjelltol 8mo agoA Socratic law professor will demoralize students by leading them, no matter the principle or reasoning, to a decision that stands for exactly the opposite. GPT or I can make excuses and advocate for our pet theories, but these contrary decisions exist, everywhere. I am comforted that folks still are trying to separate right from wrong. Maybe it’s that effort and intention that is the thread of legitimacy our courts dangle from.
- snitty 8mo agoArguing that this is a Common Law matter in this scenario is funny in a wonky lawyerly kind of way. The legal issue they were testing in this experiment is choice of law and procedure question, which is governed by a line of cases starting with Erie Railroad in which Justice Brandies famously said, "There is no federal common law."
- rgoldfinger 8mo agoYou should read the paper because it addresses this.