: Parliamentary institutions generate extensive, domain-specific legislative documents, including normative texts and parliamentary debate transcripts. These documents differ in content and linguistic complexity, making automatic summarization essential for producing coherent summaries aligned with institutional standards. While large language models (LLMs) achieve high summarization quality, their computational requirements limit deployment in parliamentary and public-sector environments. In contrast, small language models (SLMs) offer a more resource-efficient alternative, but their capabilities and performance relative to LLMs, extractive methods, and other SLMs remain underexplored. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of SLMs for legislative summarization, assessing their effectiveness across document types and languages. We use two complementary datasets: EUR-Lex-Sum, a multilingual corpus of normative texts covering six European languages, and ParcanDeb-Sum, a Spanish dataset of p[...]
: This article belongs to the debate » Thinking Machines, Thinking Lawyers14 October 2026The (Currently) Uneven Intelligence of AI in Comparative Constitutional Law From Years of Research to a Single Prompt? Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to accelerate and improve the quality of research. This potential has inspired numerous projects exploring how AI could help scholarship on constitutional law. For example, there is research using AI to interpret constitutions,1) apply constitutional principles,2) and predict court rulings.3) Even the question of whether AI could improve the process of constitution-making has been studied.4) AI’s potential is particularly significant for comparative constitutional research. Systematically comparing legal systems requires locating sources from different jurisdictions, which are often difficult to access and only available in local languages. The creation of comparative legal datasets has thus involved considerable personnel, time, and financial resources. AI ca[...]