# Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18644 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18644/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03299/) (2022)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [Distilling Knowledge from Reader to Retriever for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04584/) (2020)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [Efficient Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04212/) (2021)
- [ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13562/) (2021)
- [Paragraph-level Rationale Extraction through Regularization: A case study on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13084/) (2021)
- [Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09168/) (2017)
- [Swiss-Judgment-Prediction: A Multilingual Legal Judgment Prediction Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00806/) (2021)
- [LeXFiles and LegalLAMA: Facilitating English Multinational Legal Language Model Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07507/) (2023)
- [Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09241/) (2023)
- [Legal Judgment Prediction via Multi-Perspective Bi-Feedback Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03969/) (2019)
- [FairLex: A Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Fairness in Legal Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07228/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Use of Text Classification in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09306/) (2017)
- [Predicting the Law Area and Decisions of French Supreme Court Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01681/) (2017)
- [Why do Nearest Neighbor Language Models Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02828/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11761/) (2023)
- [Give Me Convenience and Give Her Death: Who Should Decide What Uses of NLP are Appropriate, and on What Basis?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13213/) (2020)
- [On the Ethical Limits of Natural Language Processing on Legal Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02751/) (2021)
- [Deconfounding Legal Judgment Prediction for European Court of Human Rights Cases Towards Better Alignment with Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13836/) (2022)
- [On the Role of Negative Precedent in Legal Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08225/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Transfer of Article-aware Legal Outcome Classification for European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00609/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Task Dependency and Contrastive Learning for Case Outcome Classification on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00768/) (2023)
- [Towards Explainability and Fairness in Swiss Judgement Prediction: Benchmarking on a Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17013/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LegalReasoner: Step-wised Verification-Correction for Legal Judgment Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07443/) (2025)
- [GLARE: Agentic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16383/) (2025)
- [Towards Explainable Adjudicative Variance: Quantifying Judicial Discretion via Gated Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27069/) (2026)
- [LLMs for Legal Subsumption in German Employment Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01734/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inspired by the legal doctrine of stare decisis, which leverages precedents (prior cases) for informed decision-making, we explore methods to integrate them into LJP models. To facilitate precedent retrieval, we train a retriever with a fine-grained relevance signal based on the overlap ratio of alleged articles between cases. We investigate two strategies to integrate precedents: direct incorporation at inference via label interpolation based on case proximity and during training via a precedent fusion module using a stacked-cross attention model. We employ joint training of the retriever and LJP models to address latent space divergence between them. Our experiments on LJP tasks from the ECHR jurisdiction reveal that integrating precedents during training coupled with joint training of the retriever and LJP model, outperforms models without precedents or with precedents incorporated only at inference, particularly benefiting sparser articles.