Three Queen’s Law scholars have received federal funding to support their research through the annual Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant funding competition. Professor Samuel Dahan, whose research focuses on AI and the law; Professor Nicolas Lamp, international trade law and policy; and Professor Jacob Weinrib, constitutional rights, received grants totalling close to $644,000 as part of $11.5M in government funding to boost Queen’s research. These prestigious awards advance faculty members’ investigations and provide important opportunities for students to work as research assistants.

Professor Dahan was funded for his project “Exploring Human-AI Methods for Access to Justice.”

As Director of the Queen’s Conflict Analytics Lab (CAL), at the core of Dahan’s research is OpenJustice, the first open-source platform designed to instill legal knowledge and reasoning into language models. This project focuses on AI-assisted tools designed for legal aid providers who support the estimated 78 per cent of Canadians who need legal counsel but can’t afford it.

Emerging technologies such as ChatGPT, known as large language models (LLM), may ease pro bono attorneys' workloads, allowing them to help more people, but they have significant limitations, including high error rates. Despite this, “there is little knowledge about — and no established best practices on — how AI can help legal aid providers serve more clients more efficiently and effectively,” Dahan says.

Focusing on AI-assisted tools designed for pro bono organizations, Dahan’s research will undertake two interrelated projects: 1) develop new computational law methods to improve legal AI in the context of access to justice and (2) evaluate their real-world impact.

1) Building upon insights gleaned through OpenJustice, the project will address the limitations of LLMs by developing second-generation computational law techniques. The focus will be on improving human-AI interactions through dialogue flows — structured, conversational paths that guide AI interactions, breaking legal problems down into decision points and producing logical responses. These novel methods will be hosted on the OpenJustice platform, and the research team will collaborate with Pro Bono Ontario to pilot legal dialogue flows for high-demand areas like housing and employment. If the pilot is successful, the initiative will be replicated with other pro bono partners across Canada.

2) To evaluate the real-world impact, the team will build a collaborative, knowledge-sharing network of Access to Justice (A2J) organizations, working with them to compare the performance of custom legal solutions such as OpenJustice to general-purpose AI such as GPT. The team will also evaluate AI's impact on the productivity of pro bono organizations, focusing on increasing their capacity to serve more clients while incorporating gender inclusivity and anti-racist perspectives.

“Beyond contributing to AI-assisted legal help, this project may have practical implications for other fields struggling with access issues, notably health care,” Dahan says. “It will also offer the first empirical analysis, through randomized controlled studies, of AI's impact on the efficiency, accuracy, and fairness of legal services. Ultimately, it will shed light on how AI can best be deployed to mitigate the Canadian access-to-justice crisis.”

Dahan’s funding was the highest amount awarded for a SSHRC Insight Grant among Queen’s recipients this year.  

In addition to this SSHRC grant, OpenJustice recently received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and project partners totalling more than $1.3 million. Read more in this Queen’s Gazette article and this Queen’s Law article.

Professor Lamp‘s project, “Trading in (Dis)Order: The Crisis of Globalization and the Future of International Trade Law and Policy,” addresses the current period of upheaval in international trade. While politicians and trade officials used to view open trade in pursuit of greater efficiencies as the default policy, a series of recent crises — including the protectionist turn in U.S. trade policy, the COVID-19 pandemic, the re-emergence of geopolitical competition and industrial policy, and the climate crisis — have unsettled assumptions about how the world economy will evolve and have undermined confidence in the institutions and instruments governments have been using to govern.

While the previous free trade order, for all its faults, provided well-understood concepts and policy tools that helped structure government thinking and public debates, the recent fundamental changes in the trade policy landscape have created a sense of disorientation among government officials, businesses, civil society, and academic observers. “Our sense of certainty is gone, and we are still searching for mental maps to make sense of the new reality and for instruments and institutions that will help us to govern it effectively,” Lamp says.

The goal of this project is to develop an analytical framework and a legal and policy toolbox that will allow government officials, businesses, civil society, and academics to both understand and shape the trade policy response to the crisis of globalization.

Lamp’s analytical framework will trace the changes in trade policy over the past years along four dimensions: the purposes for which governments regulate trade, the partners with whom they want businesses to trade, the products and services they want to see traded, and the tools they use to regulate trade. The framework will help identify the key trade-offs between different policy objectives, as well as the epistemic (do we have the required knowledge?), technical (which instruments are available to achieve a particular objective?), and institutional (who decides?) challenges arising from the shifting trade policy landscape. It will also incorporate a legal assessment of different policy options and help identify the implications of the changing trade policies for the international trade regime.

“The framework will help government officials, businesses, civil society, and academics to diagnose changes in trade policy more accurately, to develop more effective strategies to shape and respond to those changes, and to predict the legal effects of those changes more confidently,” Lamp says. “By structuring our thinking about trade policy along the four dimensions of purposes, partners, products and services, and tools, and identifying the interlinkages between those dimensions, the framework will create more transparency in the trade policymaking process and in the public discourse about trade policy.” It will also inform discussions relevant to the review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), scheduled for 2026.

Professor Weinrib’s project, “Constitutional Rights and the Justification Crisis,” observes that we live in an age where “constitutional rights are everywhere invoked and everywhere contested.” Any legal subject can challenge the validity of any authoritative act or omission simply on the grounds that it violates rights-based standards. As a matter of constitutional theory, however, rights-based constitutionalism remains enigmatic. There is no overarching theory that explains the logic of rights-based constitutional order.

When confronted by difficult cases — whether concerning the constitutional rights of Indigenous Peoples to land and to their traditional ways of life, the rights of socio-economically disadvantaged persons to state action to ensure adequate access to housing or health care, or the rights of young or unborn persons to public policies that will mitigate or counteract climate change — courts often “collapse  into rival institutional, interpretive, and doctrinal frameworks,” Weinrib says. “The fate of rights-bearers often depends upon which approach courts happen to adopt. As a result, rights-bearers are uncertain about the protections to which they are entitled, and public authorities are uncertain about the standards to which they will be held.”

Weinrib’s goal is to formulate and defend a unified theory of rights-based constitutional order. “I will show that rights-based constitutionalism has its own distinctive moral project, which consists in the creation, preservation, and refinement of a legal order in which no person is subject to plenary power,” he says. “I will show that no other mode of governance is capable of fulfilling this project.” Further, Weinrib will expound the connection between this overarching moral project and particular modes of constitutional interpretation and justification appropriate to adjudicating disputes involving constitutional rights.  

The project will have multiple impacts. It will improve legal outcomes by providing lawyers and judges with a comprehensive and principled framework for the adjudication of disputes involving constitutional rights; advance understanding of the role constitutional rights play in other fields of law, such as administrative and criminal law; contribute to broader debates in legal and political theory concerning the nature of justification and the structure of constitutional rights; and improve legal education by illuminating the structure and significance of the judicial doctrines that animate contemporary constitutional law, including purposive interpretation and proportionality.

“Because this project transcends debates within particular jurisdictions, these impacts will reverberate from Canada to the broader world of rights-based constitutional states,” Weinrib says.

By Tracy Weaver