OpenJustice founder Samuel Dahan receives nearly $500,000 for global study on courts' use of AI
Samuel Dahan receives nearly $500k NSERC grant to lead a global study co-designing AI for courts to improve access to justice.Summary
The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada awarded $498,885 to Queen's University law professor Samuel Dahan for a five-year international project titled "Courtroom Intelligence: Co-Designing AI for Courts." As principal investigator and founder of OpenJustice, Dahan will lead a multidisciplinary team from law, computer science, linguistics, and social science, collaborating with judicial partners in Canada, France, Hong Kong, and the Council of Europe, as well as academic institutions including Queen's Smith School of Business, Toronto Metropolitan University, McGill, Harvard Law, University College London, and Leiden University.
The initiative aims to develop an open-source judicial AI framework that makes legal reasoning inspectable, auditable, and trustworthy, addressing the current gap where most AI tools hallucinate and produce error‑filled filings for self‑represented litigants. Using a no‑code reasoning‑flows interface, judges and lawyers can model statutes, evidence evaluation, and precedent application directly. The project will also cover drafting assistance, decision standardization, evidence admissibility, and deepfake detection, while training over 20 trainees and producing benchmarks, policy guidance, and a verified platform. Dahan noted a related $3.9 million CFI Innovation Fund proposal for a sovereign legal AI computing system.
(Source：Complete Ai Training)