Title
LegalVis: Exploring and Inferring Precedent Citations in Legal Documents
Date Issued
01 January 2022
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Resck Domingues L.E.
Ponciano J.R.
Nonato L.G.
Publisher(s)
IEEE Computer Society
Abstract
To reduce the number of pending cases and conflicting rulings in the Brazilian Judiciary, the National Congress amended the Constitution, allowing the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) to create binding precedents (BPs), i.e., a set of understandings that both Executive and lower Judiciary branches must follow. The STF's justices frequently cite the 58 existing BPs in their decisions, and it is of primary relevance that judicial experts could identify and analyze such citations. To assist in this problem, we propose LegalVis, a web-based visual analytics system designed to support the analysis of legal documents that cite or could potentially cite a BP. We model the problem of identifying potential citations (i.e., non-explicit) as a classification problem. However, a simple score is not enough to explain the results; that is why we use an interpretability machine learning method to explain the reason behind each identified citation. For a compelling visual exploration of documents and BPs, LegalVis comprises three interactive visual components: the first presents an overview of the data showing temporal patterns, the second allows filtering and grouping relevant documents by topic, and the last one shows a document's text aiming to interpret the model's output by pointing out which paragraphs are likely to mention the BP, even if not explicitly specified. We evaluated our identification model and obtained an accuracy of 96%; we also made a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results. The usefulness and effectiveness of LegalVis were evaluated through two usage scenarios and feedback from six domain experts.
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias de la computación Derecho
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85125329439
Source
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
ISSN of the container
10772626
Sponsor(s)
This work was supported in part by CNPq-Brazil under Grants #303552/2017-4 and #312483/2018-0, in part by Rio de Janeiro State Funding Agency (FAPERJ)-Brazil under Grant #E-26/201.424/2021, in part by Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)-Brazil under Grant #2013/07375-0, and the School of Applied Mathematics at Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV)
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus