Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2503.03888

AI for Scaling Legal Reform: Mapping and Redacting Racial Covenants in Santa Clara County

Faiz Surani·Mirac Suzgun·Vyoma Raman·Christopher D. Manning·Peter Henderson·Daniel E. Ho
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Legal reform can be challenging in light of the volume, complexity, and interdependence of laws, codes, and records. One salient example of this challenge is the effort to restrict and remove racially restrictive covenants, clauses in property deeds that historically barred individuals of specific races from purchasing homes. Despite the Supreme Court holding such racial covenants unenforceable in 1948, they persist in property records across the United States. Many jurisdictions have moved to identify and strike these provisions, including California, which mandated in 2021 that all counties implement such a process. Yet the scale can be overwhelming, with Santa Clara County (SCC) alone having over 24 million property deed documents, making purely manual review infeasible. We present a novel approach to addressing this pressing issue, developed through a partnership with the SCC Clerk-Recorder's Office. First, we leverage an open large language model, finetuned to detect racial covenants with high precision and recall. We estimate that this system reduces manual efforts by 86,500 person hours and costs less than 2% of the cost for a comparable off-the-shelf closed model. Second, we illustrate the County's integration of this model into responsible operational practice, including legal review and the creation of a historical registry, and release our model to assist the hundreds of jurisdictions engaged in similar efforts. Finally, our results reveal distinct periods of utilization of racial covenants, sharp geographic clustering, and the disproportionate role of a small number of developers in maintaining housing discrimination. We estimate that by 1950, one in four properties across the County were subject to racial covenants.

Explore related subjects

cs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Faiz Surani, Mirac Suzgun, Vyoma Raman, Christopher D. Manning, Peter Henderson, Daniel E. Ho. 2025-03-07. AI for Scaling Legal Reform: Mapping and Redacting Racial Covenants in Santa Clara County. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03888

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

DA-Cramming: Enhancing Cost-Effective Language Model Pretraining with Dependency Agreement Integration

Pretraining language models is still a challenge for many researchers due to its substantial computational costs. As such, there is growing interest in developing more affordable pretraining methods. One notable advancement in this area is the Cramming technique (Geiping and Goldstein, 2022), which enables the pretraining of BERT-style language models using just one GPU in a single day. Building on this innovative approach, we introduce the Dependency Agreement Cramming (DA-Cramming), an efficient framework that integrates information about dependency agreements into the pretraining process. Unlike existing methods that leverage similar semantic information during finetuning, our approach represents a pioneering effort focusing on enhancing the foundational language understanding with semantic information during pretraining. We meticulously design a dual-stage pretraining work flow with four dedicated submodels to capture representative dependency agreements at the chunk level, effectively transforming these agreements into embeddings to benefit the pretraining. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods across various tasks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

BigO(Bench): Can LLMs Generate Code with Controlled Time and Space Complexity?

We introduce BigO(Bench), a novel coding benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of generative language models in understanding and generating code with specified time and space complexities. This benchmark addresses the gap in current evaluations that often overlook the ability of models to comprehend and produce code constrained by computational complexity. BigO(Bench) includes tooling to infer the algorithmic complexity of any Python function from profiling measurements, including human- or LLM-generated solutions. BigO(Bench) also includes of set of 3,105 coding problems and 1,190,250 solutions from Code Contests annotated with inferred (synthetic) time and space complexity labels from the complexity framework, as well as corresponding runtime and memory footprint values for a large set of input sizes. We present results from evaluating multiple state-of-the-art language models on this benchmark, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in handling complexity requirements. In particular, token-space reasoning models are unrivaled in code generation but not in complexity understanding, hinting that they may not generalize well to tasks for which no reward was given at training time.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

UR$^2$: Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning. However, existing attempts to unify these paradigms remain narrow in scope, typically limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings, which constrains generalization to broader domains. To address this limitation, we propose UR$^2$ (Unified RAG and Reasoning)), a general reinforcement learning framework that dynamically coordinates retrieval and reasoning. UR$^2$ introduces two key designs: a difficulty-aware curriculum that selectively invokes retrieval only for challenging instances, and a hybrid knowledge access strategy that combines domain-specific offline corpora with on-the-fly LLM-generated summaries. Together, these components mitigate the imbalance between retrieval and reasoning and improve robustness to noisy information. Experiments on open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that UR$^2$, built on Qwen-2.5-3/7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, consistently outperforms existing RAG and RL baselines, and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini on several benchmarks. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/UR2.

cs.CL↗