Verifiable Provenance for AI Judicial Decision Support Using Transparency Logs and Citation Entailment

Abstract We present VADP, an independently auditable systems-integration architecture for AI-assisted judicial decision support. Rather than proposing new cryptographic primitives, VADP contributes a domain-specific structural integration: binding Zero-Trust ABAC, Natural Language Inference (NLI) citation entailment, TreeSHAP feature attributions, and RFC 6962 transparency-log ledgers into a seven-field Verification Contract under conformal risk bounds, giving courts a checkable artifact anchoring evidentiary custody, authorization, and explainability (Section 63(4), Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023). Empirical validation over a 1,500-query judicial benchmark yields a Mean Reciprocal Rank of 0.951 and Precision@1 of 0.931 . An NLI citation-entailment gate intercepts 94.4% of ungrounded claims and 98.0% of direct contradictions. The architecture demonstrates a 100.0% defense rate against prompt-injection (versus 11.0% undefended) and 100.0% tamper-detection across 10,000 contract corruptions. A conformal risk-control framework, calibrated on 500 appellate cases and evaluated on a disjoint 200-case test set, bounds automated escalation misses to 4.50% against a target risk of α = 0.05, using an appellate-outcome labeling rule that has not yet been independently audited by a legal-domain expert outside the authoring team. An initial same-split retraining experiment appeared to reach P@1 = 1.0000; a disjoint train/test protocol revealed this to be an overfitting artifact. Jurisdiction-specific retraining under a disjoint split yields a substantial out-of-distribution gain over baseline (P@1 0.482→0.684 SCOTUS, 0.441→0.612 ECtHR); these cross-jurisdictional figures remain below the in-domain benchmark (P@1 = 0.931), short of parity. Six infrastructure results (Hyperledger Fabric consensus, HSM/KMS key isolation, Groth16 ZK proof-of-concept) demonstrate single-host feasibility only; none has been evaluated under live, multi-organization deployment settings. The Groth16 component uses a single-operator trusted setup with no formal soundness guarantee — an engineering demonstration, not a security claim. The Verification Contract's explainability field (Field 4) attributes the retrieval re-ranker's ranking decisions via TreeSHAP; it does not explain the generative model's underlying legal reasoning, which remains outside this prototype's scope.