Glossary
The vocabulary.
One definition per term, in the first sentence, so a person or a machine can quote it.
Owned vocabulary
Say it the same way every time.
- Substance verification
- Confirming that a legal proposition holds, whom it favors, and whether it survived, not merely that the citation exists.
- Proposition-level
- Treating the proposition, not the document, as the unit of legal knowledge. An attorney cites a proposition and offers a case as authority for it.
- The five failure modes
- The five ways a real, correctly quoted case still loses a motion: wrong proposition, dicta as holding, wrong direction, narrowed rule, rejected argument.
- Party favorability
- Which side a holding helps, calibrated to future litigation rather than to who won the source case.
- Treatment classification
- Per-proposition classification of how later courts treated a holding, from overruled through narrowed and distinguished to followed, recorded by scope, severity and mechanism. See the standard.
- Authority health
- A composite signal over negative treatment, limiting and distinguishing density, dissent and citation trajectory, computed for the proposition rather than the opinion.
- Shallow ambiguity
- Uncertainty that comes from incomplete research: the controlling authority exists and has not been found yet. More retrieval resolves it.
- Genuine ambiguity
- Uncertainty that comes from the law itself: courts reach conflicting conclusions on the same question, so no amount of research resolves it. It has five sources: semantic, normative, methodological, jurisdictional and analogical.
- Doctrinal uncertainty
- Whether the law is contested, as distinct from model confidence, which is how sure a system is of its own output. A well-calibrated model can be confident about a question on which the circuits have split.
- Temporal drift
- A holding that shifts over time without any opinion declaring the old rule overruled, so that no negative treatment signal is ever generated.
- Stance inversion
- The same legal principle appearing with opposite orientations across cases.
- Doctrinal bridge
- A recognized move by which authority travels from a decided case to a new conclusion. If no bridge carries it, the “therefore” is argument, not law.
- Counter-model
- In opposition practice, a complete, court-ready account of why the motion fails: the alternative draft of the order, grounded in the record and constrained by the governing standard.
- Negative-space retrieval
- Indexing what courts refused to do, so that “has anyone tried this and failed?” is a searchable question.
- Structural reliability
- Reliability where the stored representation makes an error class impossible or reliably detectable, as opposed to opportunistic reliability, where correctness depends on retrieval happening to surface the missing context.
- Citation lock
- The property that no model in the system writes a citation. The citation is retrieved from the verified record, verified, and locked.
- Filing-grade
- Research that surfaces the proposition that does the legal work, with the correct stance, at the correct procedural stage, still good law, and currently citable in this forum.
- Dispositive Recall
- The ADR-Hard composite: right proposition, right stance, right stage, good law and currently citable, all at once.
- Dispositive pathway
- A legally sufficient chain of propositions that, if established under the summary judgment standard, permits the court to enter the requested judgment. One claim may have several; only one has to survive.
- Minimum Dispositive Fact Set
- The smallest set of factual propositions that must hold for a dispositive pathway to produce the target judgment, separated from the facts that only tell the story.
- Qualified pathway
- A dispositive pathway that has survived the law, the record, the opponent’s strongest supported attack and the discovery still outstanding, as determined by the MSJ Qualifier. The alternatives are BLOCKED and UNRESOLVED.
- UNKNOWN
- A first-class decision state meaning a proposition cannot yet responsibly support a dispositive pathway. UNKNOWN is not NO: missing review is never converted into missing evidence.
- Computational law
- The discipline, seventy years old, of formalizing legal reasoning so that a machine can carry it out under constraint.
- Defensibility Certificate
- The counsel-signed artifact isResponsive() issues when per-request recall bounds, elusion bounds and active-learning convergence are all satisfied, hash-pinned to the exact criteria used.
- Show Your Work
- The frozen derivation record every filed document carries, sealed and anchored at filing.
- Still good law
- A proposition that has not been reversed, vacated, overruled, abrogated, narrowed at the line cited, or placed under review that bars citation.
- The proposition holds
- The line you are relying on is the holding, favors your side, governs at your posture in your forum, and survived.