Argumentative Analysis of Legal Rulings: A Structured Framework Using Bobbitt’s Typology

Carlotta Giacchetta, Raffaella Bernardi, Barbara Montini, Jacopo Staiano, Serena Tomasi


Abstract
Legal reasoning remains one of the most complex and nuanced domains for AI, with current tools often lacking transparency and domain adaptability. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for legal analysis, their ability to structure and interpret judicial argumentation remains unexplored. address this gap by proposing a structured framework for AI-assisted legal reasoning, centered on argumentative analysis. this work, we use GPT-4o for discourse-level and semantic analysis to identify argumentative units and classify them according to Philippe Bobbitt’s six constitutional modalities of legal reasoning.apply this framework to legal rulings from the Italian Court of Cassation.experimental findings indicate that LLM-based tools can effectively augment and streamline legal practice, by e.g. preprocessing the legal texts under scrutiny; still, the limited performance of the state-of-the-art generative model tested indicates significant room for progress in human-AI collaboration in the legal domain.
Anthology ID:
2025.argmining-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Argument mining Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Elena Chistova, Philipp Cimiano, Shohreh Haddadan, Gabriella Lapesa, Ramon Ruiz-Dolz
Venues:
ArgMining | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
107–115
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.argmining-1.10/
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Cite (ACL):
Carlotta Giacchetta, Raffaella Bernardi, Barbara Montini, Jacopo Staiano, and Serena Tomasi. 2025. Argumentative Analysis of Legal Rulings: A Structured Framework Using Bobbitt’s Typology. In Proceedings of the 12th Argument mining Workshop, pages 107–115, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Argumentative Analysis of Legal Rulings: A Structured Framework Using Bobbitt’s Typology (Giacchetta et al., ArgMining 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.argmining-1.10.pdf