Academic Research

This page lists academic publications with at least two LegIT authors. We have had the pleasure of collaborating with numerous external coauthors in this work: Cleo Condoravdi, Meru Gopalan, Stefan Th. Gries, Michael Kranzlein, Junghyun Min, Abhishek Purushothama, James Pustejovsky, Brian Slocum, Devika Tiwari, Micaela Wells, Ethan Wilcox, and Amir Zeldes.

2026

• Linguistics and textualism.
  Kevin Tobia and Brandon Waldon (2026). New York University Law Review. [SSRN]
• Prompting from the bench: Large-scale pretraining is not sufficient to prepare LLMs for ordinary meaning analysis.
  Abhishek Purushothama, Junghyun Min, Brandon Waldon, and Nathan Schneider. Proceedings of the Ninth Annual ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT 2026).
• Sense and sensitivity: “Reasoning” models are more robust, but can diverge from human consensus in a legal interpretation task.
  Dawson Petersen, Abhishek Purushothama, and Nathan Schneider. Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2026).

2025

• Large language models for legal interpretation? Don’t take their word for it.
  Brandon Waldon, Nathan Schneider, Ethan Wilcox, Amir Zeldes, and Kevin Tobia (2025). Georgetown Law Journal 114(1, Nov).
• Reading law with linguistics: the statutory interpretation of artifact nouns.
  Brandon Waldon, Cleo Condoravdi, James Pustejovsky, Nathan Schneider, and Kevin Tobia (2025). Harvard Journal on Legislation 62(2, Jun): 415–467.
• Legal-CGEL: Analyzing legal text in the CGELBank framework.
  Brandon Waldon, Micaela Wells, Devika Tiwari, Meru Gopalan, and Nathan Schneider (2025). Proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2025).
• Scope Ambiguity Resolution of Negated Connectives in English Corpora.
  Micaela Wells, Brandon Waldon, and Nathan Schneider (2025).
  Abstract at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2025).

2024

• CuRIAM: Corpus re Interpretation and Metalanguage in U.S. Supreme Court opinions.
  Michael Kranzlein, Nathan Schneider, and Kevin Tobia (2024). Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024).

2022

• Unmasking textualism: Linguistic misunderstanding in the transit mask order case and beyond.
  Stefan Th. Gries, Michael Kranzlein, Nathan Schneider, Brian Slocum, and Kevin Tobia (2022). Columbia Law Review Forum 122(8, Dec):192−213.