Benjamin Alarie

Overview

Benjamin Alarie is Professor of Law and the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. His research lies at the intersection of tax law, artificial intelligence, legal theory, and judicial decision-making. He studies how computational systems are changing legal reasoning and professional practice, and how legal institutions can become more predictable, accessible, and responsive.

In 2016, Alarie coined the term “legal singularity” in the University of Toronto Law Journal to describe a future in which advances in artificial intelligence make law increasingly clear, predictable, and knowable in practice. He developed the thesis with Abdi Aidid in The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award and was shortlisted for the Donner Prize. With Samuel I. Becher, he extends the argument from legal prediction to institutional design in Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2026).

Alarie is the author, co-author, or editor of nine books and collections and more than 65 articles. His scholarship spans taxation, judicial behaviour, legal prediction, and the design of AI-enabled legal systems. His work, including the co-authored treatise Canadian Income Tax Law, has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada. His other books include Commitment and Cooperation on High Courts (Oxford University Press, 2017) and several editions of Canadian Income Tax Law.

Alarie is also co-founder and CEO of Blue J, a University of Toronto spinout founded in 2015. Blue J applies artificial intelligence to tax research and is used by thousands of accounting and law firms. His academic and entrepreneurial work form a continuous research program: developing theories about computational law, implementing them in professional practice, and examining their implications for reliability, access to justice, and institutional design.

Alarie has held the Osler Chair since 2016 and has been a full professor since 2018. He previously served as Associate Dean of the First Year Program. He holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for the Honourable Madam Justice Louise Arbour. More information, including recent writing and speaking, is available at benjaminalarie.com.