A Framework for Self-Explaining Legal Documents

Legal document drafting is an essential professional skill for attorneys and judges. To maintain stylistic and substantive consistency and decrease drafting time, new documents are often created by modifying previous documents. This paper proposes a framework for document reuse based on an explicit representation of the illocutionary and rhetorical structure underlying documents. Explicit representation of this structure facilitates (1) interpretation of previous documents by enabling them to “explain themselves,” (2) construction of documents by enabling document drafters to issue goal-based specifications and rapidly retrieve documents with similar intentional structure, and (3) maintenance of multi-generation documents. The applicability of this framework to a representative class of judicial orders— jurisdictional show-cause orders—is demonstrated.