Can LLMs Reason in a Legally Meaningful Manner? A Small-scale Study on European Court of Human Rights Cases

arXiv:2608.17168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning has become a standard technique and feature for contemporary LLMs; however, its application and quality in the context of demanding legal-oriented tasks, such as legal case forecasting, remain under explored. We investigate how LLMs reason in the context of legal case forecasting, using legal cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a testbed. We evaluate OpenAI GPT 5.4, a recent top-tier LLM, by exploring alternative prom...