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Lawyers and judges alike rely on explanatory parentheticals to concisely convey the substance of a decision. Indeed, the common law is infested with these case-summarizing parentheticals.
Because these parentheticals follow a common format, including the use of an introductory gerund - (holding, (distinguishing, (rejecting, etc. - they are amenable to automated extraction. During an ongoing fellowship project at Stanford CodeX, the speaker extracted hundreds of thousands of explanatory parentheticals from federal case law. Concise case summaries written by judges have many uses including enabling a curation of opinions that is at once automated, nuanced, and trustworthy. The parenthethicals can also enable an auto-populated citator tool that, though limited in coverage, is not limited treatment to strongly negative treatment.