LLMs in Legal Interpretation

A recent wave of practical and academic work seeks to deploy LLMs as “interpreters” of legal texts, as an efficient and reliable method to determine the meaning of the law. Many disagree. This talk will introduce the concept of legal interpretation and its significance for the law, summarise the state of the art in the field of LLM-enabled legal interpretation, and discuss some challenging questions regarding the computer science and philosophical assumptions behind LLM-enabled legal interpretation in order to explore the prospects of this field of LLM application. This talk is based on a Leverhulme International Fellowship project called “Probabilistic Legal Interpretation”.