Dissecting Judicial Reasoning in U.S. Copyright Damage Awards

Abstract

Judicial reasoning in copyright damage awards poses a core challenge for computational legal analysis. Although federal courts follow the 1976 Copyright Act, their interpretations and factor weightings vary widely across jurisdictions. This inconsistency creates unpredictability for litigants and obscures the empirical basis of legal decisions. This research introduces a novel discourse-based Large Language Model (LLM) methodology that integrates Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) with an agentic workflow to extract and quantify previously opaque reasoning patterns from judicial opinions. Our framework addresses a major gap in empirical legal scholarship by parsing opinions into hierarchical discourse structures and using a three-stage pipeline, i.e., Dataset Construction, Discourse Analysis, and Agentic Feature Extraction. This pipeline identifies reasoning components and extract feature labels with corresponding discourse subtrees. In analyzing copyright damage rulings, we show that discourse-augmented LLM analysis outperforms traditional methods while uncovering unquantified variations in factor weighting across circuits. These findings offer both methodological advances in computational legal analysis and practical insights into judicial reasoning, with implications for legal practitioners seeking predictive tools, scholars studying legal principle application, and policymakers confronting inconsistencies in copyright law.