Fenced Citation-Context Retrieval for Case Law: Temporal Leakage and Degree Control Across Two Jurisdictions

Prior case retrieval (PCR) aims to identify the precedent cases relevant to the facts of a query case. Incoming citation context, the text with which later cases characterize a case when citing it, is a powerful relevance signal, yet it is typically evaluated without a temporal constraint, so the retriever is credited with citations made after the query. We introduce a zero-training, temporally fenced retriever that augments BM25 with incoming citation context restricted to citations predating the query, together with a temporal-admission decomposition that quantifies the phantom fraction: the share of a citation-context gain attributable to citations not known to predate the query. Experiments span two jurisdictions, U.S. federal (CLERC) and European (ECtHR-PCR) case law. On ECtHR-PCR, without any training, the fenced retriever outperforms a strong degree-controlled baseline across the full recall ladder, and a temporal-admission decomposition attributes 14.9% (validation) of an unfenced citation-context gain over BM25 to citations not known to predate the query. Citation-context retrieval must therefore be temporally fenced and degree-controlled before its reported gains can be interpreted.

Charge as a Construct-Validity Factor in Chinese Legal Case Retrieval: A Cross-Benchmark Audit

Chinese Legal Case Retrieval (LCR) benchmarks grade a reference judgment relevant when its legal characterization matches the query, and strong systems now reach NDCG@10 of 0.85-0.88. Most of the BM25-to-best-trained gap is recoverable with no retrieval model: ranking candidates only by shared primary charge, broken by BM25, closes 99.2% of it on LeCaRDv2 -- with no detectable difference from the best-trained system. This reflects benchmark design: LeCaRDv2 defines top relevance via the crime's key constitutive elements, which encode the charge, so same-charge cases are relevant by construction (relevance lift 4.49; charge-to-relevance macro-AUC 0.871). Holding charge fixed, the trained reranker's advantage over BM25 collapses to a small within-charge residual (+0.026 NDCG@10, cluster-bootstrap CI excluding zero, about a quarter), the only non-definitional positive. The effect is not uniform: the same rule recovers 84.3% on LeCaRDv1 and is out of spec on CAIL2022, with the charge-to-relevance signal weakening in step (macro-AUC 0.871/0.759/0.728); a predicted-charge cascade reproduces 76.6% on LeCaRDv2 but does not transfer. The construct is also cashable at first stage: an exploratory zero-training charge-pool channel lifts LeCaRDv2 recall (R@100 +0.025, wrong-charge controls hurt), reported as a positive control for the confound, not a retrieval method or novelty claim. Charge is thus a high-leverage construct-validity factor at the benchmark level -- not auniform explanation of NDCG@10, and not evidence that any system relies on charge. We package established construct-validity and partial-input checks as a reusable charge-controlled protocol (CCE); on all three benchmarks its triggers come back null or descriptive, behaving as designed. We release the scripts, schema, and protocol so future benchmarks can be screened before their NDCG@10 is read as legal-reasoning ability.