The Promise of AI for Positive Comparative Law
Join us for an AI and the Law conference with professor Benjamin Alarie, University of Toronto.
Abstract
Artificial intelligence and machine-learning are now improving our understanding of the law in taxation and employment. Over the course of the coming decades, the insights engendered by these new approaches to law will give rise to new fields of research.
One of the key areas of research that will be developed further and deeply affected by machine-learning will be comparative law. In the near term, researchers will explore sub-national and international dimensions using machine-learning, highlighting the positive similarities and differences in approaches to factually similar disputes across sub-national and international borders. In the longer term, normative aspects will take precedence.
I speculate that ultimately the positive and normative developments will lead us to a legal singularity, in which legal uncertainty is radically curtailed and almost entirely eliminated.
About the speaker
Benjamin Alarie is the CEO of Blue J Legal and holds the Osler Chair in Business Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Professor Alarie researches and teaches in taxation law and judicial decision-making, and was awarded the Alan Mewett QC Prize for excellence in teaching by the law school鈥檚 graduating class of 2009. Before joining the University of Toronto as a full-time professor in 2004, Professor Alarie completed graduate work in law at the Yale Law School and was a law clerk for Madam Justice Louise Arbour at the Supreme Court of Canada. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. He is a coauthor of several editions of a leading legal text on tax law, Canadian Income Tax Law, including the most recent 6th edition (LexisNexis, 2018). He holds a B.A. (Laurier), an M.A. (Toronto), a J.D. (Toronto), and an LL.M. (Yale).
AI and the Law Series
The AI and the Law Series is brought to you by the Montreal Cyberjustice Laboratory; the McGill Student Collective on Technology and Law; the Private Justice and the Rule of Law Research Group; and the McGill Centre for Intellectual Property Policy.
