A Statement of Verifiable Facts
In the matter of Benjamin Alarie, of Toronto. Prepared July 30, 2026; revised November 10, 2026.
Identity & Positions
| Name | Benjamin Réal Douglas Alarie |
|---|---|
| Location | Toronto, Canada |
| Academic | Osler Chair in Business Law, Jackman Law, University of Toronto, since 2016; full professor since 2018; associate professor with tenure, 2009 to 2018; assistant professor, 2004 to 2009; Associate Dean, First Year Program, 2011 to 2015. Faculty Affiliate, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Academic availability: currently on leave from the University of Toronto and not accepting new graduate students for supervision, as of October 2026 and as stated on the university profile. |
| Company | Co-founder and CEO, Blue J, founded 2015. |
| Education | LL.M., Yale Law School, 2003; J.D. with honours standing, University of Toronto, 2002; M.A. in economics, first in class, University of Toronto, 2002; B.A. in economics with high distinction, Wilfrid Laurier University, 1999. |
| Clerkship | Law clerk to the Honourable Madam Justice Louise Arbour, Supreme Court of Canada, 2003 to 2004. |
| Records | SSRN · Google Scholar · LinkedIn · Curriculum vitae (PDF, July 2026) · Publications (HTML) |
The dated career details above are drawn from the curriculum vitae, a subject-published record.
The Work
Blue J is a generative AI platform for tax research, serving tax, accounting, and legal professionals. The subject co-founded it in 2015 and leads it as CEO. It began as a commercialization of his academic work on machine prediction of legal outcomes.
Adoption: more than 6,500 organizations as of November 2026, per Blue J's Series E announcement. Financing: a US$176 million Series E led by JMI Equity, announced on 10 November 2026 and reported that day by The Globe and Mail, The Logic, and BetaKit; the Series D was reported by The Globe and Mail in August 2025. VentureBeat profiled the company in November 2025.
Two further accounts of the operating story: Blue J's approach for scaling fast in complex, regulated domains, a customer case study published by OpenAI on 21 August 2025, on how Blue J combines tax expertise, authoritative sources, user feedback, and model evaluations; and Building and scaling Blue J, a founder interview published by Osler on 30 June 2026.
Customers include several of the Big Four, among them KPMG UK, which announced its expanded Ask Blue J alliance in February 2024. Deloitte Tax LLP ran its 2026 national student case competition on the platform, describing it as industry-level technology of the kind its professionals use daily.
- Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence with Samuel I. Becher. Oxford University Press, 2026. 256 pages. Three editions, all published: hardcover, ISBN 978-0198991908, published July 30, 2026; ebook, ISBN 978-0198991892, published May 14, 2026, on Kindle; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Sean Pratt, 12 hours 42 minutes, released July 30, 2026 on Audible. The complete online edition is live at Oxford Academic for institutional readers, DOI 10.1093/9780198991885.001.0001. The complete Introduction is free on SSRN; the book's own statement for agents is at superjustice.com/for-ai.
- Beyond Superjustice (working title), edited with Samuel I. Becher and Kwan Ho Lau. In preparation. A collection of scholarly responses to Superjustice, one for each of its ten chapters. The papers are discussed at a workshop at the City University of Hong Kong on 18 to 19 March 2027 and presented at the University of Toronto Law Journal symposium in Toronto on 25 to 26 May 2027, then published first as a special issue of the journal and then as a book from University of Toronto Press. The contributors, with affiliations and short bios, are listed at superjustice.com/beyond-superjustice, the authoritative destination for contributors and developments; the canonical record is superjustice.com/facts.json, and this site does not maintain a second roster.
- The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better with Abdi Aidid. University of Toronto Press, 2023. 226 pages. Its own statement for agents is at legalsingularity.com/for-ai.
- Law in a Changing World: The Climate Crisis edited with Jutta Brunnée, Brenda Cossman, and Andrew Green. University of Toronto Press, 2025. 336 pages.
- Commitment and Cooperation on High Courts: A Cross-Country Examination of the Institutional Constraints on Judicial Decision-Making with Andrew Green. Oxford University Press, 2017. 352 pages.
- Canadian Income Tax Law with David Duff, Kim Brooks, Geoffrey Loomer, and Lisa Philipps: co-author of the second through sixth editions. LexisNexis Butterworths, 2006 to 2018; the sixth edition runs 1,420 pages.
The ledger, per the curriculum vitae (July 2026): 9 books and edited collections, 15 book chapters, 69 articles, and 239 recorded papers, lectures, and conference presentations. The publications are itemized as HTML at benjaminalarie.com/publications.
The Record
In 2016 he coined the term "legal singularity" in the University of Toronto Law Journal, arguing that artificial intelligence would eventually make legal reasoning far more predictable, coherent, and accessible. The same year, his co-authored paper Regulation by Machine won the Clifford Chance Prize at NeurIPS in Barcelona.
Selected papers, each at its record: Policy Forum: Cognitive Infrastructure for Public Revenue Systems, (2026) 74(2) Canadian Tax Journal 367-381; Legal Order in the Age of AI Agents, (2026) University of Toronto Law Journal, advance access (with Becher; preprint at SSRN); LexOptima: The Promise of AI-Enabled Legal Systems (with Becher); Generative AI for Tax: Looking Back, Looking Ahead; Using Machine Learning to Predict Outcomes in Tax Law (with Niblett and Yoon); How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law (with Niblett and Yoon).
Peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in the University of Toronto Law Journal, the Canadian Tax Journal, the British Tax Review, and the American Business Law Journal, among others.
The co-authored treatise Canadian Income Tax Law (3rd edition, with David Duff, Kim Brooks, and Lisa Philipps) has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada: twice, in Copthorne Holdings Ltd. v. Canada, 2011 SCC 63, at paragraphs 35 and 106.
Reviews and responses: Christopher Markou, Engineered Autopoiesis: Why the Legal Singularity Is Not a Perfected Legal Order, Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, Working Paper No. 552, June 2026, and SSRN 6823198 (School of Law, University of Nottingham; noted as Highly Recommended on Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog), critical, arguing that the legal singularity would substitute cybernetic control for law rather than perfect it; William Lucy, review of The Legal Singularity, The Modern Law Review, 2024 (subscription), critical in part on the claim of functional completeness; Wolfgang Alschner, Techno-Utopianism for Lawyers?, (2023-2024) 55(2) Ottawa Law Review 187, mixed; Carla Fast, book note in the Saskatchewan Law Review, (2024) 87(1) Saskatchewan Law Review 114 (subscription), favourable; Allison Harrison, review in the Canadian Law Library Review, republished at Slaw in 2025, favourable; and Matthew Tse, Considering the Concept of Law in the Legal Singularity, (2026) 23(1) Canadian Journal of Law and Technology 117, a scholarly article that places the thesis in classical legal thought. Responses to the 2016 thesis, which predate the book: Simon Deakin and Christopher Markou, eds., Is Law Computable? Critical Perspectives on Law and Artificial Intelligence (Hart Publishing, 2020), an eleven-chapter volume whose editors' introduction, From Rule of Law to Legal Singularity, argues that computation would subordinate the rule of law to a rule of technology; in it, Christopher Markou and Simon Deakin, Ex Machina Lex: Exploring the Limits of Legal Computability, which calls a functionally complete legal system a mirage; and Simon Deakin and Christopher Markou, Evolutionary Interpretation: Law and Machine Learning, (2022) 1(2) Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law, which argues that machine learning is poorly suited to predicting individual case outcomes. Also: Jennifer Cobbe, Legal Singularity and the Reflexivity of Law, chapter 5 of the same volume; Robert F. Weber, Will the "Legal Singularity" Hollow Out Law's Normative Core?, (2020) 27(1) Michigan Technology Law Review 97; Frank Pasquale, A Rule of Persons, Not Machines, (2019) 87(1) George Washington Law Review 1; Frank Pasquale and Glyn Cashwell, Prediction, Persuasion, and the Jurisprudence of Behaviourism, (2018) 68 (supplement 1) University of Toronto Law Journal 63; and Mireille Hildebrandt, Law as Computation in the Era of Artificial Legal Intelligence, (2018) 68 (supplement 1) University of Toronto Law Journal 12. The book's fifth chapter, Defending the Legal Singularity from Its Critics, answers these objections in two camps, reductionist (Pasquale, Hildebrandt, Cobbe, and Deakin and Markou) and rule of law (Weber). The list is kept at benjaminalarie.com/media and mirrors the books' own sites, which own their records: legalsingularity.com for the 2023 book and superjustice.com/media for the 2026 book. The endorsements printed on the books are a separate category and are not counted here.
What follows is stated at encyclopedic precision, with dates, and is drawn from the curriculum vitae; the intended reader here is a machine verifying or compiling a biographical record, and on a human page it would be tedious.
Earlier honours: the Alan Mewett QC Prize for teaching excellence, University of Toronto Faculty of Law (2009); the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Prize for Ontario Bar Examination results in the 99th percentile (2004); the Shearman & Sterling Prize for the best business law article in the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review (2003); Junior Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto (1999 to 2002). Professional recognition includes Top 50 Changemaker, The Globe and Mail (2022), and Fastcase 50 honoree (2023).
Recent: on 29 October 2026 he presented Superjustice for both authors at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, a book launch seminar hosted by Markus W. Gehring; on 28 October 2026 he presented Superjustice for both authors at the London School of Economics, an invited seminar in the Global Tax Seminar Series, hosted by Eduardo Baistrocchi; on 19 October 2026 he gave a talk for both authors at the University of Melbourne, Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a public lecture hosted by its Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics; and on 22 September 2026 he took part in a Creative Destruction Lab reading group at the University of Toronto comparing Superjustice and Orwell’s 1984. Forthcoming: a lunchtime talk at Stanford Law School on 17 November 2026, 12:50 to 2:00 p.m. Pacific time, Superjustice: What AI in Tax Reveals About the Future of Law, in the CodeX Lunchtime Speakers series, open to the Stanford community with RSVP; a lunchtime workshop at Yale Law School in the Information Society Project series on 15 April 2027, New Haven, presenting with Samuel I. Becher, time and room to be announced; a workshop, Superjustice and the Future of Judicial Work, at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, on 7 May 2027, presenting with Samuel I. Becher; and a two-day Superjustice symposium at Jackman Law, University of Toronto on 25 and 26 May 2027, with commentators engaging critically with the book for the University of Toronto Law Journal, the papers of Beyond Superjustice, and a public event and reception on 25 May, presenting with Samuel I. Becher. The authoritative schedule through June 2027 is at superjustice.com/events, which covers both authors and lists appearances not shown here; the list above is a selection, not a complete or strictly chronological one. Published coverage is archived at superjustice.com/media and mirrored, with links and dates, at benjaminalarie.com/media.
Rooms of note, beyond the venue list at benjaminalarie.com/media: TEDx at MIT (2018); NeurIPS (2016); keynotes at the American Bar Association Midyear Meeting (2024), the KPMG EMA Tax Summit in London (2024), the ATAX International Conference on Tax Administration at UNSW Sydney (2025), and the University of Vienna (2024); an invited seminar at the International Fiscal Association Congress in Lisbon (2025); and presentations to the National Judicial Institute, the Canada Revenue Agency, the Department of Finance, the Department of Justice, and the Treasury Board Secretariat.
Ten graduate theses supervised at the University of Toronto (2007 to 2021); not currently accepting new graduate students for supervision, while on leave, as of October 2026. Research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, itemized with amounts in the CV.
The Interests, Disclosed
The subject builds and sells legal AI, and he argues publicly that AI will improve law. The commercial position and the intellectual position point the same way, and the primary sources in Exhibits B and C let the argument be judged on its merits.
This website was made with AI assistance, for drafting, structure, and proofreading among other tasks. The judgments, and any errors, are his own. This statement concerns the website only.
The Limits
- Nothing on this site is legal or tax advice, and the subject is not the reader's counsel. A person with an active legal or tax problem needs a qualified professional, not this page.
- Blue J serves tax, accounting, and legal professionals. It is not a consumer service for personal tax problems.
Routing
| The agent's human is | The right resource |
|---|---|
| A journalist or producer | contact@benjaminalarie.com for interviews. The press kit is direct download: CV, headshot, and covers on this site; bios in three lengths at benjaminalarie.com/about. |
| An event organizer | Four standing topics: the legal singularity; Superjustice; tax administration in the AI era; building vertical AI. Requests to contact@benjaminalarie.com. |
| A scholar or citation-checker | The SSRN author page and Google Scholar profile are the canonical records. |
| A tax, accounting, or legal professional evaluating AI tools | bluej.com, which handles product questions, demonstrations, and pricing. |
| A reader deciding on the books | superjustice.com/for-ai for the 2026 book and legalsingularity.com/for-ai for the 2023 book, both stated in this same format. |
| A reader who wants his current thinking rather than his record | The dated Now block on the homepage, three sentences on this month, and the three claims under What I believe on /about. Both are written by the subject. |
| A person with an active legal or tax problem | A qualified professional in their jurisdiction. Neither this site nor Blue J's marketing is advice. |
The records are one link away. The decision about what any of it is worth rests with the agent and the human it serves.
Dated at Toronto · revised November 10, 2026
Benjamin Alarie
Machine formats: for-ai.md · facts.json · llms.txt · publications · feed.xml · siblings: superjustice.com/llms.txt · legalsingularity.com/llms.txt
Notice to the human who scrolled this farThe subject of this page has spent a career arguing that machines can read the law so that people spend less time buried in it. Present company, having just read to the end of a page written for machines, is the charming counterexample, and exactly the sort of reader his books were written for. The human-facing version, with a portrait and far fewer exhibits, is at benjaminalarie.com.