mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

On the Ethical Limits of Natural Language Processing on Legal Text

arXiv 2105.02751 ↗First posted 6 May 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 26

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Abstract (arXiv)

Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer legal scholars and practitioners a range of tools allowing to empirically analyze law on a large scale. However, researchers seem to struggle when it comes to identifying ethical limits to using NLP systems for acquiring genuine insights both about the law and the systems' predictive capacity. In this paper we set out a number of ways in which to think systematically about such issues. We place emphasis on three crucial normative parameters which have, to the best of our knowledge, been underestimated by current debates: (a) the importance of academic freedom, (b) the existence of a wide diversity of legal and ethical norms domestically but even more so internationally and (c) the threat of moralism in research related to computational law. For each of these three parameters we provide specific recommendations for the legal NLP community. Our discussion is structured around the study of a real-life scenario that has prompted recent debate in the legal NLP research community.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 8 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 May 2021.

Builds on

8 of 33 references.

References · 8

  1. 2019Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in Englishcited by 209
  2. 2020How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligencecited by 129
  3. 2020LEGAL-BERT: The Muppets straight out of Law Schoolcited by 111
  4. 2021Paragraph-level Rationale Extraction through Regularization: A case study on European Court of Human Rights Casescited by 77
  5. 2017Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basiscited by 61
  6. 2018Interpretable Charge Predictions for Criminal Cases: Learning to Generate Court Views from Fact Descriptionscited by 36
  7. 2019Charge-Based Prison Term Prediction with Deep Gating Networkcited by 31
  8. 2020Give Me Convenience and Give Her Death: Who Should Decide What Uses of NLP are Appropriate, and on What Basis?cited by 27

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 4; 2022: 5; 2023: 11; 2024: 4; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

26 papers.

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  1. 2021LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in Englishcited by 310
  2. 2021Can Machines Learn Morality? The Delphi Experimentcited by 141
  3. 2023LEXTREME: A Multi-Lingual and Multi-Task Benchmark for the Legal Domaincited by 68
  4. 2021Swiss-Judgment-Prediction: A Multilingual Legal Judgment Prediction Benchmarkcited by 60
  5. 2023MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpuscited by 60
  6. 2023LeXFiles and LegalLAMA: Facilitating English Multinational Legal Language Model Developmentcited by 54
  7. 2022FairLex: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Fairness in Legal Text Processingcited by 49
  8. 2022LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Datasetcited by 36
  9. 2022ClassActionPrediction: A Challenging Benchmark for Legal Judgment Prediction of Class Action Cases in the UScited by 17
  10. 2022An Empirical Study on Cross-X Transfer for Legal Judgment Predictioncited by 16
  11. 2023Bringing order into the realm of Transformer-based language models for artificial intelligence and lawcited by 13
  12. 2022Towards a multi-stakeholder value-based assessment framework for algorithmic systemscited by 12
14 more
  1. 2023Leveraging Task Dependency and Contrastive Learning for Case Outcome Classification on European Court of Human Rights Casescited by 12
  2. 2024LegalLens: Leveraging LLMs for Legal Violation Identification in Unstructured Textcited by 12
  3. 2021Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2021): Workshop and Shared Task Reportcited by 9
  4. 2023Finding the Law: Enhancing Statutory Article Retrieval via Graph Neural Networkscited by 9
  5. 2023The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnectscited by 8
  6. 2023Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Modelscited by 7
  7. 2023Anonymity at Risk? Assessing Re-Identification Capabilities of Large Language Modelscited by 7
  8. 2024Towards Explainability and Fairness in Swiss Judgement Prediction: Benchmarking on a Multilingual Datasetcited by 7
  9. 2023Regulation and NLP (RegNLP): Taming Large Language Modelscited by 5
  10. 2025LeCoPCR: Legal Concept-guided Prior Case Retrieval for European Court of Human Rights casescited by 5
  11. 2024Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Casescited by 4
  12. 2024Know When to Fuse: Investigating Non-English Hybrid Retrieval in the Legal Domaincited by 1
  13. 2023The Ethics of Automating Legal Actorscited by 0
  14. 2026N"urnberg NLP at ChildSafeAds 2026: Structurally Dissimilar Voter Ensembles under Four Levels of Data Accesscited by 0