Knowing the Form, Not the Function: Automatically Auditing Answer--Authority Decoupling in Legal Benchmarks

Legal benchmarks typically score final answers even when models also state legal authority. We test whether answer correctness can serve as a proxy for authority grounding. Under ordinary reasoning prompts that did not request statutory citations, four LLMs spontaneously produced authority markers across 238 Taiwan bar-examination items. Because each item has a verified governing provision, we automatically audit answer correctness and authority grounding jointly. The two dimensions dissociate in both directions. In criminal law, 24.0--42.4% of valid responses were answer-correct but missed the gold authority, while 15.2--21.7% were answer-incorrect but cited it. A separate statutory-retrieval probe and a permissive citation-abstention intervention further show that answer and citation behavior can move separately at the output level. Because this mismatch arises without adversarial or inconsistency-inducing prompting, answer-only scoring treats naturally occurring gold-authority misses as complete benchmark successes. Because statutory authority is structurally extractable and externally verifiable, the failure can be measured automatically. A preliminary PRC civil-law extension also observes citation-unrequested authority marking, motivating a full cross-jurisdictional joint audit. We therefore propose joint answer--authority evaluation for statute-grounded legal benchmarks.