Argumentative Analysis of Legal Rulings: A Structured Framework Using Bobbitt’s Typology

Legal reasoning remains one of the most complex and nuanced domains for AI, with current tools often lacking transparency and domain adaptability.While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for legal analysis, their ability to structure and interpret judicial argumentation remains unexplored.We address this gap by proposing a structured framework for AI-assisted legal reasoning, centered on argumentative analysis.In this work, we use GPT-4o for discourselevel and semantic analysis to identify argumentative units and classify them according to Philippe Bobbitt's (Bobbitt, 1984) six constitutional modalities of legal reasoning.We apply this framework to legal rulings from the Italian Court of Cassation.Our experimental findings indicate that LLM-based tools can effectively augment and streamline legal practice, by e.g.preprocessing the legal texts under scrutiny; still, the limited performance of the state-of-theart generative model tested indicates significant room for progress in human-AI collaboration in the legal domain.