Through the Lens of Split Vote: Exploring Disagreement, Difficulty and Calibration in Legal Case Outcome Classification

In legal decisions, split votes (SV) occur when judges cannot reach a unanimous decision, posing a difficulty for lawyers who must navigate diverse legal arguments and opinions. In high-stakes domains, understanding the alignment of perceived difficulty between humans and AI systems is crucial to build trust. However, existing NLP calibration methods focus on a classifier's awareness of predictive performance, measured against the human majority class, overlooking inherent human label variation (HLV). This paper explores split votes as naturally observable human …

ai systems alignment case classification cs.cl decision decisions diverse domains humans judges lawyers legal opinions systems through understanding