# Bridging Legal Interpretation and Formal Logic: Faithfulness, Assumption, and the Future of AI Legal Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 3 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## 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, 3 of 3)

- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Reasoning4Sciences: Bridging Reasoning Language Models to All Scientific Branches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01145/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing adoption of large language models in legal practice brings both significant promise and serious risk. Legal professionals stand to benefit from AI that can reason over contracts, draft documents, and analyze sources at scale, yet the high-stakes nature of legal work demands a level of rigor that current AI systems do not provide. The central problem is not simply that LLMs hallucinate facts and references; it is that they systematically draw inferences that go beyond what the source text actually supports, presenting assumption-laden conclusions as if they were logically grounded. This proposal presents a neuro-symbolic approach to legal AI that combines the expressive power of large language models with the rigor of formal verification, aiming to make AI-assisted legal reasoning both capable and trustworthy, thus reducing the burden of manual verification without sacrificing the accountability that legal practice demands.