What Is the Law? A System for Statutory Research (STARA) with Large Language Models
This article an automated artificial intelligence system designed to perform complex legal compilations known as "statutory surveys".
The resource addresses a critical governance challenge: legal codes have grown so vast, interconnected, and complex that even government agencies lack a systematic, definitive grasp of existing statutory mandates.
To solve this, STARA utilizes a domain-specific architecture—powered by a fine-tuned LLaMA-3 model—to map structural relationships like hierarchy, defined terms, and cross-references within legal corpora. The authors validated the tool’s performance against human-compiled benchmarks across three distinct core tasks: counting federal criminal offenses, auditing congressionally mandated agency reports, and cataloging city commissions established by San Francisco.
Share this Resource:
