Comment by alexfringes
13 hours ago
Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
I don't know of anything that is working yet, but I know some people working on it (intentionally vague).
Roman law, on which the legal systems of Germany, most of Europe, Turkey etc. are based relies more heavily on statutes than Anglo-American case law, but cases do play a role there, too. That's why a practically useful system also needs to have access to court decisions, commentary etc. - and while the statues are in the public domain, a lot of the other knowledge is owned by specialist publishers (such as: C.H. Beck, Nomos, Mohr Siebeck, De Gruyter, Otto Schmidt, C.F. Müller, Manz, Verlag Österreich, Schulthess, Stämpfli, Dalloz, LexisNexis, Lefebvre Dalloz, Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre, CEDAM, Giappichelli, Il Mulino, Aranzadi, Tirant lo Blanch, Marcial Pons, Dykinson, Tecnos, Lefebvre, Almedina, Gestlegal, AAFDL, Kluwer, Boom juridisch, Wolters Kluwer, Larcier-Intersentia, Anthemis, Sakkoulas, Nomiki Bibliothiki, Universul Juridic, Hamangiu).
Internationally, legal systems appear to undergo a sort of convergence, which means statutes increasingly matter in the U.S. and cases increasingly matter in European law (according to a law partner friend).