University of Toronto Press · 2023
The Legal Singularity
How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better
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University of Toronto Press · 2023
How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better
The Legal Singularity argues that AI can make law more predictable, coherent, and fair. Aidid and Alarie examine the limits of today's legal institutions and show how legal prediction could transform the way law is interpreted, applied, and delivered. The result is an ambitious case for what they call the legal singularity: a future state in which law becomes functionally complete.
"A powerful and important book. The fundamental insight, that artificial intelligence will transform not just the specific content of legal rules but the general nature of law, is surely correct. Essential reading for legal theorists."
"A compelling case that law as we know it will change dramatically, and that justice will be the biggest beneficiary."
"Timely, challenging, and profound. A book that deserves to be read widely by naysayers and evangelists alike."
Ten chapters and an afterword. The book opens by introducing the legal singularity and recounting the history of legal information, then defines computational law and develops the idea of complete law. A full chapter, "Defending the Legal Singularity from Its Critics," takes the objections head on. Three chapters work through the implications for the judiciary, for lawyers and the public, and for governments; a chapter on ethics, a conclusion, and an afterword on ChatGPT close it. The origin paper is free to read: The Path of the Law: Towards Legal Singularity (University of Toronto Law Journal, 2016).
Why read it in 2026? The book was written before the newest generation of AI systems, and that is the point: its argument is about the trajectory of legal prediction, not any one model. The trajectory has only steepened since 2023, and the later work carries it forward.
The argument in four steps: law today is incomplete, inaccessible, and expensive to administer; machine prediction of legal outcomes is maturing fast, and the authors have built it in production; as prediction improves, it reconfigures legal institutions, practice, and access to justice; the end state is the legal singularity, functionally complete law, vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects.
The Legal Singularity argued that AI-enabled prediction can make law complete and knowable. Superjustice (Oxford University Press, July 30, 2026, by Samuel I. Becher and Benjamin Alarie) asks how entire legal systems should be redesigned once those capabilities exist. Between the two sit LexOptima (2025) and Legal Order in the Age of AI Agents (2026); in practice, Blue J applies the trajectory to tax.
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