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Law General

The Legal Singularity

How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better

by (author) Abdi Aidid & Benjamin Alarie

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Jul 2023
Category
General, Criminology, Technology Studies
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487529413
    Publish Date
    Jul 2023
    List Price
    $44.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487529437
    Publish Date
    Jun 2023
    List Price
    $44.95

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Description

Law today is incomplete, inaccessible, unclear, underdeveloped, and often perplexing to those whom it affects. In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

 

Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the problems of the law and improve our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the "technological singularity," The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional "completeness" of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally, the law is vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions.

About the authors

Abdi Aidid is a graduate of Yale Law School and assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto.

Abdi Aidid's profile page

Benjamin Alarie holds the Osler Chair in Business Law in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and is an affiliated faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Benjamin Alarie's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, The 2024 PROSE Award in Legal Studies and Criminology Awarded by the Association of American Publishers
  • Short-listed, 2023 Donner Prize Awarded by The Donner Prize