Stop Removing Stopwords: How an Inherited Preprocessing Default Distorts Legal Text-as-Data

Empirical legal scholarship increasingly treats judicial text as data, and much of it still runs on sparse, interpretable pipelines—TF-IDF features and linear classifiers—because the textual feature is often the object of study rather than a means to a prediction. Yet these pipelines inherit preprocessing defaults from mid-century information retrieval that were never validated against classification accuracy. The most entrenched of these is stopword removal. This study introduces an exhaustive single-word ablation that measures a preprocessing step’s effect directly against the downstream objective, and applies it to stopword removal as the hardest case to dislodge. Matching Supreme Court Database labels to Caselaw Access Project opinion texts, the study examines two binary tasks that bracket F1 headroom, ideological direction (no-removal baseline F1 ≈ 0.68) and constitutional versus non-constitutional law type (≈0.92), across 7,668 and 7,001 opinions. For each task, the ablation removes each of roughly 18,500 candidate words in turn, and a task-specific stoplist is built from the resulting measurements. Generic stoplists in common use fall below the no-removal baseline on held-out opinions in all twelve tests. The task-specific stoplists move held-out F1 by +0.0023 (95% CI [−0.0124, +0.0170]) on ideology and by +0.0001 ([−0.0082, +0.0085]) on law type. Neither task shows a detectable benefit from removal, and a supplemental analysis finds that word-level statistics predict a word’s removal effect poorly, because the words’ true removal effects differ by less than the measurement can register and so leave little to predict. The method generalizes to any inherited preprocessing default, and the result is a caution specific to interpretable legal text-as-data, where a step that reshapes which features a model sees can distort the doctrinal and ideological signal the research is meant to recover. The burden of proof sits with removal.