Knowing the Form, Not the Function: Automatically Auditing Answer--Authority Decoupling in Legal Benchmarks
arXiv:2608.02621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal benchmarks typically score final answers even when models also state legal authority. We test whether answer correctness can serve as a proxy for authority grounding. Under ordinary reasoning prompts that did not request statutory citations, four LLMs spontaneously produced authority markers across 238 Taiwan bar-examination items. Because each item has a verified governing provision, we automatically audit answer correctness and authority grounding jointly. The two dimensions dissociate in both directions. In criminal law, 24.0--42.4\% of valid responses were answer-correct but missed the gold authority, while 15.2--21.7\% were answer-incorrect but cited it. A separate statutory-retrieval probe and a permissive citation-abstention intervention further show that answer and citation behavior can move separately at the output level. Because this mismatch arises without adversarial or inconsistency-inducing prompting, answer-only scoring treats naturally occurring gold-authority misses as complete benchmark successes. Because statutory authority is structurally extractable and externally verifiable, the failure can be measured automatically. A preliminary PRC civil-law extension also observes citation-unrequested authority marking, motivating a full cross-jurisdictional joint audit. We therefore propose joint answer--authority evaluation for statute-grounded legal benchmarks.
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[Submitted on 3 Jul 2026]
Title:Knowing the Form, Not the Function: Automatically Auditing Answer--Authority Decoupling in Legal Benchmarks
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Abstract:Legal benchmarks typically score final answers even when models also state legal authority. We test whether answer correctness can serve as a proxy for authority grounding. Under ordinary reasoning prompts that did not request statutory citations, four LLMs spontaneously produced authority markers across 238 Taiwan bar-examination items. Because each item has a verified governing provision, we automatically audit answer correctness and authority grounding jointly. The two dimensions dissociate in both directions. In criminal law, 24.0--42.4\% of valid responses were answer-correct but missed the gold authority, while 15.2--21.7\% were answer-incorrect but cited it. A separate statutory-retrieval probe and a permissive citation-abstention intervention further show that answer and citation behavior can move separately at the output level. Because this mismatch arises without adversarial or inconsistency-inducing prompting, answer-only scoring treats naturally occurring gold-authority misses as complete benchmark successes. Because statutory authority is structurally extractable and externally verifiable, the failure can be measured automatically. A preliminary PRC civil-law extension also observes citation-unrequested authority marking, motivating a full cross-jurisdictional joint audit. We therefore propose joint answer--authority evaluation for statute-grounded legal benchmarks.
Comments: 9 pages, 11 tables
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.02621 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.02621v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02621
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Hsien-Jyh Liao [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Jul 2026 07:18:53 UTC (18 KB)
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