# SafeLawBench: Towards Safe Alignment of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06636 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06636/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 28 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/safety-alignment-and-jailbreak-attacks/)

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

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04657/) (2023)
- [Safe RLHF: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12773/) (2023)
- [Safety Alignment Should Be Made More Than Just a Few Tokens Deep](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05946/) (2024)
- [R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10019/) (2024)
- [PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15513/) (2024)
- [SORRY-Bench: Systematically Evaluating Large Language Model Safety Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14598/) (2024)
- [WildTeaming at Scale: From In-the-Wild Jailbreaks to (Adversarially) Safer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18510/) (2024)
- [Do-Not-Answer: A Dataset for Evaluating Safeguards in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13387/) (2023)
- [Aligner: Efficient Alignment by Learning to Correct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02416/) (2024)
- [On Protecting the Data Privacy of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05156/) (2024)
- [On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08466/) (2021)
- [Are Your LLMs Capable of Stable Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13147/) (2024)
- [Elo Uncovered: Robustness and Best Practices in Language Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17295/) (2023)
- [Align Anything: Training All-Modality Models to Follow Instructions with Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15838/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Deceptive Alignment via Self-Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18807/) (2025)
- [Mix Data or Merge Models? Balancing the Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness of Large Language Model via Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06876/) (2025)
- [AI Governance and Accountability: An Analysis of Anthropic's Claude](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01557/) (2024)
- [Mitigating the Backdoor Effect for Multi-Task Model Merging via Safety-Aware Subspace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13910/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Sentiment Analysis with Local Large Language Models using Majority Voting: A Study on Factors Affecting Restaurant Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13069/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Towards Advanced Mathematical Reasoning for LLMs via First-Order Logic Theorem Proving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17104/) (2025)
- [Unified Defense for Large Language Models against Jailbreak and Fine-Tuning Attacks in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14423/) (2025)
- [Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22642/) (2026)
- [Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Deliberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14760/) (2025)
- [EU-Agent-Bench: Measuring Illegal Behavior of LLM Agents Under EU Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21524/) (2025)
- [HKGAI-V1: Towards Regional Sovereign Large Language Model for Hong Kong](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11502/) (2025)
- [Towards Multi-modal Multi-turn Safety: From Agentic Interaction to Strategic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04736/) (2026)
- [ARMOR 2025: A Military-Aligned Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Model Safety Beyond Civilian Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00245/) (2026)
- [FinRT: Distilling Adaptive Red-Teaming Strategies into Reusable Adversarial Generators in Consumer Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36474/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the growing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has raised significant concerns. However, there is still a lack of definitive standards for evaluating their safety due to the subjective nature of current safety benchmarks. To address this gap, we conducted the first exploration of LLMs' safety evaluation from a legal perspective by proposing the SafeLawBench benchmark. SafeLawBench categorizes safety risks into three levels based on legal standards, providing a systematic and comprehensive framework for evaluation. It comprises 24,860 multi-choice questions and 1,106 open-domain question-answering (QA) tasks. Our evaluation included 2 closed-source LLMs and 18 open-source LLMs using zero-shot and few-shot prompting, highlighting the safety features of each model. We also evaluated the LLMs' safety-related reasoning stability and refusal behavior. Additionally, we found that a majority voting mechanism can enhance model performance. Notably, even leading SOTA models like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o have not exceeded 80.5% accuracy in multi-choice tasks on SafeLawBench, while the average accuracy of 20 LLMs remains at 68.8%. We urge the community to prioritize research on the safety of LLMs.
