Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.
The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better. By Abdi Aidid & Benjamin Alarie. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. 226 p. Includes bibliographic references, figures, and index. ISBN 9781487529413 (hardcover) $44.95; ISBN 9781487529437 (ePUB) $44.95; ISBN 9781487529420 (PDF) $44.95.
Reviewed by Allison Harrison
Head of Acquisitions
Justice Canada Library
According to ChatGPT on July 8, 2024, “the technological singularity refers to a hypothetical future event wherein artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to unpredictable and rapid advances in technological capabilities.” Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie, authors of The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better, argue that achieving a similar singularity in law would “fundamentally transform our existing legal systems and, with them, our societies,” and that this legal singularity could “mean a stable and complete legal order, capable of addressing and resolving practically all types of legal uncertainty in real time and on demand” (p. 3).
The authors of The Legal Singularity have a lot in common. Aidid is a professor of law at University of Toronto teaching in the areas of civil procedure, torts, and law and technology. Alarie is also a professor of law at University of Toronto, exploring how artificial intelligence can be applied to legal and tax issues. Aidid was educated at the University of Toronto and Yale. Alarie was educated at Wilfred Laurier University, the University of Toronto, and Yale. In 2015 Alarie co-founded Blue J Legal to experiment with applying AI to tax law to predict outcomes and recommendations. Aidid served as the VP, Legal Research, at Blue J Legal, where he oversaw the development of machine learning-enabled research and analytics tools. Aidid is currently the Legal Innovation Strategist at Blue J Legal.
Over the course of ten chapters and an afterword, Aidid and Alarie work their way through legal information history, define computational law, and discuss how it could affect various areas of the law. The first chapter introduces the concept of the legal singularity. Chapter Two recounts the history of legal information. In Chapter Three, the authors discuss computational law, and in Chapter Four, they look at complete law and how computational law could contribute to this completeness. Chapter Five defends the legal singularity from the most common criticisms. In chapters six through eight, implications for the judiciary, lawyers, and the public, as well as for governments, are covered. Finally, ethical issues are described in Chapter Nine. The text ends with a short conclusion and an afterword about ChatGPT.
The Legal Singularity is a well-structured academic legal text. Each chapter clearly introduces the content to be discussed, and there are headings, sub-headings, and, in some cases, sub-sub-headings organizing the various concepts. Moreover, Aidid and Alarie work meticulously through their subject, clearly introducing concepts, explaining the history leading toward computational law, providing common criticisms and disproving them, and continuously giving use cases for computational law. They include multiple relevant examples to prove their arguments and clarify more technical concepts.
The Legal Singularity is packed full of many different implications, both for the legal field and society in general, that would accompany the advent of computational law. The purpose of the book is to introduce ways that the legal singularity could change the law and motivate “a discussion about its pathways and consequences” (p. 4), and, to this end, each topic is briefly discussed before the next is introduced. However, a more in-depth analysis of a smaller number of topics may have been more effective.
Nonetheless, The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better is a well-written text on the highly relevant topic of AI and the law. Aidid and Alarie are meticulous in structuring the book, providing interesting and relevant examples, and effectively explaining the more technical concepts. This book would be a good read for any legal professional who would like to know more about the ways artificial intelligence may affect the law in the future.
