# JUREX-4E: Juridical Expert-Annotated Four-Element Knowledge Base for Legal Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17166 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17166/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 17 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02478/) (2018)
- [Chatlaw: A Multi-Agent Legal Assistant based on a Role-Aligned Mixture-of-Experts Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16092/) (2023)
- [DISC-LawLLM: Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Intelligent Legal Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11325/) (2023)
- [LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16289/) (2023)
- [LEGAL-BERT: The Muppets straight out of Law School](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02559/) (2020)
- [Lawyer LLaMA Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15062/) (2023)
- [LexEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Legal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20288/) (2024)
- [Chain of Logic: Rule-Based Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10400/) (2024)
- [Everything Has a Cause: Leveraging Causal Inference in Legal Text Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09420/) (2021)
- [Can Large Language Models Grasp Legal Theories? Enhance Legal Reasoning with Insights from Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02507/) (2024)
- [DELTA: Pre-train a Discriminative Encoder for Legal Case Retrieval via Structural Word Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18435/) (2024)
- [From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04369/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PLawBench: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16669/) (2026)
- [GLARE: Agentic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16383/) (2025)
- [When Large Language Models Meet Law: Dual-Lens Taxonomy, Technical Advances, and Ethical Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07748/) (2025)
- [OBJECTION! Lawyer Agents Mitigate Guilty Bias in Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02158/) (2026)
- [LEGO: Synergizing Expert GraphRAG and Expert Chain-of-Thought for Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27009/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely applied to legal tasks. To enhance their understanding of legal texts and improve reasoning accuracy, a promising approach is to incorporate legal theories. One of the most widely adopted theories is the Four-Element Theory (FET), which defines the crime constitution through four elements: Subject, Object, Subjective Aspect, and Objective Aspect. While recent work has explored prompting LLMs to follow FET, our evaluation demonstrates that LLM-generated four-elements are often incomplete and less representative, limiting their effectiveness in legal reasoning. To address these issues, we present JUREX-4E, an expert-annotated four-element knowledge base covering 155 criminal charges. The annotations follow a progressive hierarchical framework grounded in legal source validity and incorporate diverse interpretive methods to ensure precision and authority. We evaluate JUREX-4E on the Similar Charge Disambiguation task and apply it to Legal Case Retrieval. Experimental results validate the high quality of JUREX-4E and its substantial impact on downstream legal tasks, underscoring its potential for advancing legal AI applications. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/THUlawtech/JUREX