We report the results of an experiment examining the effect of the system of rules (law model) that govern the adjudication of difficult real-world contract law disputes by senior law students. Participants rated the importance of facts that varied in relevance to the dispute throughout the course of making a decision. Similar to the coherence shift noted by other researchers studying legal decision making, the importance of facts decreased or increased consistent with their relevance as

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... d by the law model and the participant's emerging decision. We simulated these results, and the interaction between the effects of dispute difficulty and law model on decision consensus, using a constraint satisfaction network.