Re-Framing Case Law Citation Prediction from a Paragraph Perspective

Case law citation prediction, i.e., predicting what historical cases are relevant for your current case, can assist legal discovery and decision-making, but legal documents are long, and often only parts of them are relevant for a particular use case. We therefore reframe case law citation prediction as a paragraph-to-paragraph citation task, introduce a new dataset, and train and evaluate new models. We also evaluate our models qualitatively. Our resources provide a first step toward discovering citation patterns and modeling legal rules in EU law from precedent documents.