Prompting from the bench: Large-scale pretraining is not sufficient to prepare LLMs for ordinary meaning analysis

ArXi:2510.25356v2 Announce Type: replace In the U. S. judicial system, a widespread approach to legal interpretation entails assessing how a legal text would be understood by an `ordinary' speaker of the language. Recent scholarship has proposed that legal practitioners leverage large language models (LLMs) to ascertain a text's ordinary meaning. But are LLMs up to the task? As textual interpretation questions arise in spheres ranging from criminal law to civil rights, we argue it is crucial that models not be taken as authoritative without rigorous evaluation.