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arXiv · 2311.06534

Translating Legalese: Enhancing Public Understanding of Court Opinions with Legal Summarizers

Elliott Ash·Aniket Kesari·Suresh Naidu·Lena Song·Dominik Stammbach
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Abstract

Judicial opinions are written to be persuasive and could build public trust in court decisions, yet they can be difficult for non-experts to understand. We present a pipeline for using an AI assistant to generate simplified summaries of judicial opinions. Compared to existing expert-written summaries, these AI-generated simple summaries are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. We show in a survey experiment that the AI summaries help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education.

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Elliott Ash, Aniket Kesari, Suresh Naidu, Lena Song, Dominik Stammbach. 2023-11-11. Translating Legalese: Enhancing Public Understanding of Court Opinions with Legal Summarizers. https://doi.org/10.1145/3614407.3643700

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