The Legal Singularity
How artificial intelligence can make law radically better.
Order the BookOr start free: the 2016 paper that named the thesis. Or listen: the audiobook.
Out now Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the successor to this book, by Samuel I. Becher and Benjamin Alarie. Oxford University Press, hardcover 30 July 2026. superjustice.com →
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.
The legal singularity is the point at which law reaches functional completeness: practically any legal question can be resolved quickly and justly, and the law becomes knowable with practical, though not perfect, certainty across much of human activity.
The term was coined by Benjamin Alarie in "The Path of the Law: Towards Legal Singularity", (2016) 66(4) University of Toronto Law Journal 443, and developed at book length in The Legal Singularity (Aidid & Alarie, University of Toronto Press, 2023). This page is the term's canonical home.
Watch from 25:50Benjamin Alarie on why he coined “legal singularity” in 2016 and how the argument developed into Superjustice. Sarder TV, 5 August 2026.
Praise
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 SchoolA 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 SchoolTimely, 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 LawyersIndependent reviews and responses.
The endorsements above were gathered before publication. The reviews and responses below appeared afterwards, in venues the authors do not control; several are critical, and the most recent is a full-length rejection of the book’s programme. Beneath them are the scholarly responses to the 2016 thesis, all critical, which predate the book and which its fifth chapter answers, sorting them into a reductionist camp (Pasquale, Hildebrandt, Cobbe, and Deakin and Markou) and a rule-of-law camp (Weber). Everything is listed here so the argument can be weighed on more than the authors’ say-so, and is added as it appears.
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22 Jun 2026
SSRN Christopher Markou, “Engineered Autopoiesis: Why the Legal Singularity Is Not a Perfected Legal Order,” Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, Working Paper No. 552, June 2026, and SSRN 6823198; School of Law, University of Nottingham; noted as Highly Recommended on Lawrence Solum’s Legal Theory Blog, 22 June 2026. Critical, a full-length rejection of the book’s programme: argues that the legal singularity is not a perfected legality but a substitution, an engineered autopoiesis that keeps legality’s vocabulary while replacing its constitutive operations with cybernetic control and relocating discretion into the politics of measurement. A structural critique, drawing on Luhmann and on Golia and Teubner, that the author says the book’s fifth chapter, which sorts its critics into essentialists and rule-of-law theorists, is not calibrated to engage. The programme, he concludes, should be refused because what it promises is no longer law. Response
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2026
Canadian Journal of Law and Technology Matthew Tse, “Considering the Concept of Law in the Legal Singularity,” (2026) 23(1) Canadian Journal of Law and Technology 117. A scholarly article rather than a review: places the legal singularity in the tradition of classical legal thought and argues that it inherits some of that tradition’s theoretical shortcomings, while finding many existing critiques of the thesis overstated or misguided.
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23 January 2025
Canadian Law Library Review, republished at Slaw Allison Harrison. Favourable: a meticulously organized text with relevant examples, though the reviewer would have preferred a deeper analysis of fewer topics.
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July 2024
The Modern Law Review William Lucy. Critical in part: examines the claim that law can reach functional completeness and finds the book light on technical detail about how prediction would deliver it. Subscription
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2024
Ottawa Law Review Wolfgang Alschner, “Techno-Utopianism for Lawyers?,” (2023-2024) 55(2) Ottawa Law Review 187. Mixed: a hopeful and encouraging account that the reviewer says overstates what probabilistic algorithms can achieve, offering soft predictability where the thesis needs hard certainty. Pdf
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2024
Saskatchewan Law Review Carla Fast, (2024) 87(1) Saskatchewan Law Review 114. Favourable: a chapter-by-chapter book note concluding that the book makes a strong case that integrating AI will be advantageous to the law, while still requiring practitioners’ active participation. Subscription
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2022
Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law Simon Deakin and Christopher Markou, “Evolutionary Interpretation: Law and Machine Learning,” (2022) 1(2) Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law. Critical of prediction: treats legal reasoning and machine learning as parallel processes of fitting to data and concludes that machine learning may illuminate long-run legal dynamics but is poorly suited to predicting individual case outcomes, because interpretation relies on natural language to extrapolate from precedent to novel facts. His direct response to the book followed in 2026, above. Response
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2020
Michigan Technology Law Review Robert F. Weber, “Will the ‘Legal Singularity’ Hollow Out Law's Normative Core?,” (2020) 27(1) Michigan Technology Law Review 97. Critical: argues that a perfectly predictable, algorithmically expressed legal system would hollow out the rule of law’s normative core, trading the strong-form predictability that guards against arbitrary power for weak-form prediction and treating legal subjects as data points rather than equal members of a political community. The rule-of-law critique that the book’s fifth chapter answers. Open access. Response
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2020
Is Law Computable? Critical Perspectives on Law and Artificial Intelligence Simon Deakin and Christopher Markou, “From Rule of Law to Legal Singularity,” the editors’ introduction to Is Law Computable? (Hart Publishing, 2020; 272 pp.; ISBN 9781509937066; foreword by Frank Pasquale). Critical: an eleven-chapter volume written against the thesis, which the introduction quotes from the 2016 paper by name. The editors argue that replacing juridical reasoning with computation would subordinate the rule of law to a rule of technology; chapters by Mireille Hildebrandt, John Morison, Jennifer Cobbe, Roger Brownsword, Sylvie Delacroix, Ryan Abbott and Alex Sarch, Lyria Bennett Moses, Dilan Thampapillai, and Markou with Lily Hands take up code-driven law, the reflexivity of law, functional completeness, and whether there is one singularity or several. The introduction is free on SSRN. Predates the book, whose fifth chapter answers the objections. Response
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2020
Is Law Computable? Critical Perspectives on Law and Artificial Intelligence Christopher Markou and Simon Deakin, “Ex Machina Lex: Exploring the Limits of Legal Computability,” chapter 2 of Is Law Computable? (Hart Publishing, 2020). Critical: argues that a functionally complete legal system is a mirage that could divert resources to fruitless uses, because the reflexivity of law and the incompleteness of rules facing unstructured social facts resist computational replication. Free on SSRN. Response
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2020
Is Law Computable? Critical Perspectives on Law and Artificial Intelligence Jennifer Cobbe, “Legal Singularity and the Reflexivity of Law,” chapter 5 of Is Law Computable? (Hart Publishing, 2020). Critical: argues that those pursuing the legal singularity misunderstand both law and the technology; because law is reflexive, automating it would encode its designers’ priorities and reinforce them across society rather than deliver neutrality. From remarks at the Lex Ex Machina conference, Cambridge, December 2019. Free on SSRN. Response
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2019
George Washington Law Review Frank Pasquale, “A Rule of Persons, Not Machines: The Limits of Legal Automation,” (2019) 87(1) George Washington Law Review 1. Critical: cites the legal singularity by name and argues that the reasons behind legal obligations must be expressed in language by a responsible person if accountability and a humane legal order are to survive, which sets limits on legal automation. Open access at BrooklynWorks. Response
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2018
University of Toronto Law Journal Frank Pasquale and Glyn Cashwell, “Prediction, Persuasion, and the Jurisprudence of Behaviourism,” (2018) 68 (supplement 1) University of Toronto Law Journal 63. Critical: contrasts prediction with persuasion and argues that a jurisprudence built on predicting outcomes, a behaviourism, neglects the reason-giving core of law. In the same 2018 University of Toronto Law Journal symposium issue on artificial intelligence and law as Hildebrandt’s article and as Alarie, Niblett and Yoon’s How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law. Response
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2018
University of Toronto Law Journal Mireille Hildebrandt, “Law as Computation in the Era of Artificial Legal Intelligence: Speaking Law to the Power of Statistics,” (2018) 68 (supplement 1) University of Toronto Law Journal 12. Critical: names Alarie’s bet on the legal singularity and argues that it mistakes the mathematical simulation of legal judgment for legal judgment itself, confronting the assumptions of computational systems with those of law and the rule of law. Her chapter Code-Driven Law: Freezing the Future and Scaling the Past, in Is Law Computable? (2020), continues the argument. Response
The record is kept in this site’s facts.json and mirrored at benjaminalarie.com/media. A review not listed here can be sent to the authors through the contacts at superjustice.com/media.
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.
From prediction to redesign.
The Legal Singularity argued that AI-enabled prediction can make law complete and knowable. Superjustice (Oxford University Press, hardcover 30 July 2026, by Samuel I. Becher and Benjamin Alarie) asks how entire legal systems should be redesigned once those capabilities exist. It is out now in print, ebook and audio, and its complete Introduction is free on SSRN. 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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