Engineered Autopoiesis: Why the Legal Singularity Is Not a Perfected Legal Order

Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie’s The Legal Singularity (2023) is the most developed statement of an institutional design programme that would re-organise legal reproduction around computational specification and real-time prediction. The book sorts existing critics into 2 camps: essentialists (Pasquale, Hildebrandt, Cobbe, Deakin and Markou) and rule-of-law theorists (Weber) and rebuts each on its own terms. This article develops a third kind of critique, structural rather than essentialist or principles-based, that the book’s defensive architecture is not calibrated to engage. Drawing on Luhmann’s account of legal autopoiesis and on Golia Jr and Teubner’s reconstruction of societal constitutionalism, it argues that the legal singularity is not a perfected version of legality but a substitution. The diagnosis the article offers is one of engineered autopoiesis: a mode of social reproduction that retains legality’s vocabulary while substituting cybernetic control for its constitutive operations, and in which discretion is relocated into the politics of measurement. The programme is best refused not because it cannot deliver what it promises but because what it promises is no longer law.