Samuel Becher (Victoria University of Wellington) & Benjamin Alarie (University of Toronto – Faculty of Law) have posted Legal Order in the Age of AI Agents (University of Toronto Law Journal (forthcoming, 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
As AI tools increasingly shape everyday life, autonomous AI agents are emerging as a new frontier. This Article demonstrates how AI legal agents, empowered to act independently on behalf of human users, could structurally reconfigure legal systems through three transformative pathways. First, AI legal agents promise to democratize legal knowledge by dismantling vertical and horizontal institutional barriers to justice. Second, these agents could reconstitute legal authority through algorithmic constitutionalism, accelerated jurisdictional synthesis, and legal pluralism, enabling novel frameworks of AI-mediated dispute resolution that challenge traditional paradigms of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Third, such agents may shift the temporal focus of legal intervention from post-violation remediation to continuous preventive measures. Harnessing this triple transformation-the democratization, pluralistic reconstitution, and temporal shift-will require design frameworks that balance accountability with efficiency, fairness with personalization, and societal values with algorithmic optimization. Together, these developments gesture toward a legal singularity, a future in which AI legal agents, through their continuous interaction with human judgment and institutional frameworks, render law increasingly self-organizing, adaptive, and intelligible.
Highly recommended.