Professor & Osler Chair in Business Law

Jackman Law Building
Room J360
78 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5

Tel.: 416-946-8205

Benjamin Alarie, M.A. (Toronto), J.D. (Toronto), LL.M. (Yale) is an expert in tax law, judicial decision-making, machine learning, and the future of law and technology. Before joining the Faculty of Law, Professor Alarie was a graduate fellow at Yale Law School (2002-2003) and a law clerk for Madam Justice Louise Arbour at the Supreme Court of Canada (2003-2004). Over the years his publications have appeared in numerous academic journals, including the British Tax Review, the Canadian Tax Journal, and the American Business Law Journal. 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 coauthor of several editions of Canadian Income Tax Law (LexisNexis) and was awarded the Alan Mewett QC Prize for Excellence by the JD class of 2009. He is co-author (with Andrew J. Green) of the leading study of comparative empirical supreme court decision-making practices, Cooperation and Commitment on High Courts (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is an affiliated faculty member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Professor Alarie is co-founder and CEO of Blue J, a leading North American legal tech company specializing in artificial intelligence, legal prediction, and intelligent diagramming. He combines academic scholarship with legal technology through his monthly column in Tax Notes, entitled Blue J Predicts, where he analyzes recently decided and pending U.S. tax cases using machine learning. An educational Hot Docs / uDocs documentary, The A.I. Taxman, recounts the early Blue J story and outlines a vision of how artificial intelligence is likely to affect tax law in the coming decades.

Professor Alarie is co-author (with Abdi Aidid) of The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better (University of Toronto Press, 2023), available from Amazon and the University of Toronto Press. See some of the book's pre-publication press: Law360, the University of Toronto.

Professor Alarie on LinkedInwIkipediaTwitterSSRNGoogle Scholar.

Education
B.A. - Wilfrid Laurier University (1999), with high distinction
M.A. - University of Toronto (2002)
J.D. - University of Toronto (2002), with honours
LL.M. - Yale Law School (2003)
Academic appointments
Faculty Affiliate, Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Faculty Affiliate, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society
Awards and distinctions
Alan Mewett QC Prize for Excellence, University of Toronto Faculty of Law Students' Law Society (2009)
Other service
Chair, Admissions Committee, Faculty of Law
Selected publications

The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better (University of Toronto Press, 2023), with Abdi Aidid (Amazon).

"How Artificial Intelligence will Affect the Practice of Law" (2018) 68 University of Toronto Law Journal 106, with Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon (JSTOR).

Commitment and Cooperation on High Courts: A Cross-Country Examination of the Institutional Constraints on Judicial Decision-Making (Oxford University Press, 2017), with Andrew J. Green (OUP).

"The Path of the Law: Towards Legal Singularity" (2016) 66(4) University of Toronto Law Journal 443 (SSRN).

"Using Machine Learning to Predict Outcomes in Tax Law" (2016) 58(3) Canadian Business Law Journal 231, with Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon (SSRN).