Lawyers and judges alike rely on explanatory parentheticals to concisely convey the substance of a decision. Indeed, the common law is infested with these case-summarizing parentheticals.
Because these parentheticals follow a common format, including the use of an introductory gerund - (holding, (distinguishing, (rejecting, etc. - they are amenable to automated extraction. During an ongoing fellowship project at Stanford CodeX, the speaker extracted hundreds of thousands of explanatory parentheticals from federal case law.
