PROSE Award Winner · Donner Prize Shortlist

The Legal Singularity

How artificial intelligence can make law radically better.

By Abdi Aidid & Benjamin Alarie

Order the Book

Or start free: the 2016 paper that named the thesis. Or listen: the audiobook.

About the Book

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.

Praise

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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.

Daniel Markovits Guido Calabresi Professor of Law, Yale Law School

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A compelling case that law as we know it will change dramatically, and that justice will be the biggest beneficiary.

Lawrence Lessig Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School

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Timely, challenging, and profound. A book that deserves to be read widely by naysayers and evangelists alike.

Richard Susskind OBE KC (Hon) Author of Tomorrow's Lawyers

Inside the Book

Ten chapters and an afterword.

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 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 chapter records are at the publisher's page.

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 below carries it forward.

The argument's origin is free to read: The Path of the Law: Towards Legal Singularity, the 2016 University of Toronto Law Journal paper that named the term, is the thesis in seed form, at no cost.

The Argument Continues

From prediction to redesign.

The Legal Singularity argued that AI-enabled prediction can make law complete and knowable. Superjustice (Oxford University Press, July 30, 2026, by Benjamin Alarie with Samuel Becher) 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 (forthcoming 2026); in practice, Blue J applies the trajectory to tax.

Explore Superjustice

The Authors

Abdi Aidid

University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Abdi Aidid is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Access to Justice. His research and teaching focus on civil adjudication, privacy law, and the intersection of law and technology. In 2024–2025 he was a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale Law School, and he is currently the Ian D. Shugart Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service. Before entering academia, he practised litigation at Covington & Burling LLP in New York and Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP in Toronto, and served as Vice President, Legal Research at Blue J.

Benjamin Alarie

University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Benjamin Alarie has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of AI, tax, and law. In 2016 he coined the term “legal singularity” in the University of Toronto Law Journal, arguing that artificial intelligence would make legal reasoning more predictable, coherent, and accessible. He developed the thesis with Abdi Aidid in The Legal Singularity, and extended it with Samuel Becher in Superjustice (Oxford University Press, 2026). He is co-founder and CEO of Blue J, the AI research platform used at thousands of accounting and law firms, and holds the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto. He earned his LL.M. at Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada.