Empirical analysis of binding precedent efficiency in Brazilian Supreme Court via case classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Tinarrage, Raphaël, Ennes, Henrique, Resck, Lucas, Gomes, Lucas T., Ponciano, Jean R., Poco, Jorge
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Tinarrage, Raphaël
Ennes, Henrique
Resck, Lucas
Gomes, Lucas T.
Ponciano, Jean R.
Poco, Jorge
author_facet Tinarrage, Raphaël
Ennes, Henrique
Resck, Lucas
Gomes, Lucas T.
Ponciano, Jean R.
Poco, Jorge
contents Binding precedents (súmulas vinculantes) constitute a juridical instrument unique to the Brazilian legal system and whose objectives include the protection of the Federal Supreme Court against repetitive demands. Studies of the effectiveness of these instruments in decreasing the Court's exposure to similar cases, however, indicate that they tend to fail in such a direction, with some of the binding precedents seemingly creating new demands. We empirically assess the legal impact of five binding precedents, 11, 14, 17, 26, and 37, at the highest Court level through their effects on the legal subjects they address. This analysis is only possible through the comparison of the Court's ruling about the precedents' themes before they are created, which means that these decisions should be detected through techniques of Similar Case Retrieval, which we tackle from the angle of Case Classification. The contributions of this article are therefore twofold: on the mathematical side, we compare the use of different methods of Natural Language Processing -- TF-IDF, LSTM, Longformer, and regex -- for Case Classification, whereas on the legal side, we contrast the inefficiency of these binding precedents with a set of hypotheses that may justify their repeated usage. We observe that the TF-IDF models performed slightly better than LSTM and Longformer when compared through common metrics; however, the deep learning models were able to detect certain important legal events that TF-IDF missed. On the legal side, we argue that the reasons for binding precedents to fail in responding to repetitive demand are heterogeneous and case-dependent, making it impossible to single out a specific cause. We identify five main hypotheses, which are found in different combinations in each of the precedents studied.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Empirical analysis of binding precedent efficiency in Brazilian Supreme Court via case classification
Tinarrage, Raphaël
Ennes, Henrique
Resck, Lucas
Gomes, Lucas T.
Ponciano, Jean R.
Poco, Jorge
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
68T50 (Primary), 68T07 (Secondary)
Binding precedents (súmulas vinculantes) constitute a juridical instrument unique to the Brazilian legal system and whose objectives include the protection of the Federal Supreme Court against repetitive demands. Studies of the effectiveness of these instruments in decreasing the Court's exposure to similar cases, however, indicate that they tend to fail in such a direction, with some of the binding precedents seemingly creating new demands. We empirically assess the legal impact of five binding precedents, 11, 14, 17, 26, and 37, at the highest Court level through their effects on the legal subjects they address. This analysis is only possible through the comparison of the Court's ruling about the precedents' themes before they are created, which means that these decisions should be detected through techniques of Similar Case Retrieval, which we tackle from the angle of Case Classification. The contributions of this article are therefore twofold: on the mathematical side, we compare the use of different methods of Natural Language Processing -- TF-IDF, LSTM, Longformer, and regex -- for Case Classification, whereas on the legal side, we contrast the inefficiency of these binding precedents with a set of hypotheses that may justify their repeated usage. We observe that the TF-IDF models performed slightly better than LSTM and Longformer when compared through common metrics; however, the deep learning models were able to detect certain important legal events that TF-IDF missed. On the legal side, we argue that the reasons for binding precedents to fail in responding to repetitive demand are heterogeneous and case-dependent, making it impossible to single out a specific cause. We identify five main hypotheses, which are found in different combinations in each of the precedents studied.
title Empirical analysis of binding precedent efficiency in Brazilian Supreme Court via case classification
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
68T50 (Primary), 68T07 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07004