Cited but Not Consulted: A Counterfactual Audit of Legal Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness

arXiv:2610.12361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly justify legal decisions by naming the statute or precedent behind a verdict, treated as evidence that the decision follows from it. We test this directly: holding case facts fixed, we substitute the named legal authority for an unrelated one and decode a model's evolving verdict from its hidden states. Across seven open-weight models (8B-70B) and four benchmarks spanning judicial and contractual reasoning, when explicitly required to justify a verdict by naming the governing authority, models name the correct on

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