Judicial opinions are written to be persuasive and could build public trust in court decisions, yet they can be difficult for non-experts to understand. We present a pipeline for using an AI assistant to generate simplified summaries of judicial opinions. Compared to existing expert-written summaries, these AI-generated simple summaries are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. We show in a survey experiment that the AI summaries help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education.

翻译：司法意见书旨在具有说服力，并建立公众对法院判决的信任，然而非专业人士往往难以理解其内容。我们提出了一套利用AI助手生成司法意见书简化摘要的完整流程。与现有专家撰写的摘要相比，这些AI生成的简明摘要更易于公众获取，也更容易被非专业人士理解。通过一项调查实验，我们证明AI摘要能帮助受访者理解判决的关键特征，并且具有更高的感知质量，尤其是对于受教育程度较低的受访者。