Alarie Presents The Impact Of AI On Legal Education And Law Practice At Pepperdine

Benjamin Alarie (Toronto; Google Scholar) presents The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better (with Abdi Aidid (Toronto)) at Pepperdine today as part of its Dean's Speaker Series: 

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.

Reviews

"This beautifully written book makes a compelling case that law as we know it will change dramatically, and that justice will be the biggest beneficiary of that change. The opportunity that singularity presents is the chance to deliver — finally — on law’s promise, a promise it has so far left unfulfilled."
—Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School

"In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie offer a bold and optimistic prognosis about the future of AI in law and its institutions. This book is a thought-provoking contribution to computational law scholarship and is certain to drive critical discussions in the field."
—Amy Salyzyn, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

"This is a powerful and important book. The fundamental insight – that artificial intelligence will transform not just the specific content of particular legal rules but also the general nature of law — is surely correct and the conclusion is impossible to ignore. The deep learning, systematic breadth, and crisp clarity with which Aidid and Alarie prosecute their argument makes The Legal Singularity essential reading for legal theorists."
—Daniel Markovits, Guido Calabresi Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law, Yale Law School

"In their path-breaking book, the authors, both law and technology scholars and active technology practitioners, probe the potential for AI to transform most aspects of law: teaching, research, practice, judging, and the public’s access to justice. This book will become a leading source of insights and measured judgments on profound issues imminently confronting all aspects of the legal profession as an information-intensive industry."
—Michael J. Trebilcock, University Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

"I am sure that AI will be transformative for law and legal institutions and can make dramatic progress on a persistent and massive access to justice crisis. Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie have put together a careful case for how, indeed, to make law radically better."
—Gillian K. Hadfield, Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto and Senior Policy Advisor of OpenAI

"Timely, challenging, and profound, The Legal Singularity is an important contribution to the current debate on the extent to which it is possible and desirable for AI to be widely deployed in the delivery of legal and court services. A book that deserves to be read widely by naysayers and evangelists alike, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie neatly combine jurisprudential scholarship with practical experience of legal technology."
—Richard Susskind OBE KC (Hon), author of Tomorrow’s Lawyers