Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Joint CELS, CPL, CPLC and CIPIL Event

Chair: Professor Markus Gehring, CELS

This seminar and book discussion will focus on how artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding the supply of legal reasoning, but how it does not by itself produce justice. Superjustice asks what legal systems should look like when constraints of scarcity, delay, and inconsistency can increasingly be relaxed by computation. Rather than simply digitising existing institutions, Benjamin Alarie and Samuel Becher argue in their new OUP book with the same title for redesigning law as a more accessible, responsive, and adaptive framework for human flourishing. The talk and discussion will explore how AI could make legal guidance more broadly available, support more dynamic and personalized legal systems, and change the roles of judges, lawyers, educators, and policymakers. It will also confront the harder questions raised by this transformation, including bias, transparency, privacy, procedural justice, and institutional legitimacy.

Speaker:

Benjamin Alarie is the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and co-founder and CEO of Blue J, an AI platform for tax used at thousands of accounting and law firms. He has spent more than a decade applying artificial intelligence to tax and law and coined the term “legal singularity” in 2016. In addition to Superjustice (Oxford University Press, 2026) he is co-author of The Legal Singularity (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which won the 2024 AAP PROSE Award and was shortlisted for the Donner Prize. He holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Louise Arbour.

Discussants:

• Dr Emilija Leinarte, Deputy Director of CELS, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a fellow of Corpus Christi College
• Professor Christoph Winter is Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), University of Cambridge

For more information see:

https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series