The Lump of Law Fallacy - by Damien Charlotin
Artificial Authority
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The Lump of Law Fallacy<br>You have never met a norm-maker
Damien Charlotin<br>Jun 05, 2026
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One standard answer to the worries about “AI taking all the jobs” consists in pointing to the “lump of labour” fallacy.<br>In its simplest form, the fallacy is as follows: there is a finite amount of “work” to be done, such that it can be redistributed by tweaking the parameters of who works how and on what conditions; it is also vulnerable to external shocks on the supply or demand of labour. Reduce, say, the number of standard work hours (as France did when moving to a 35-hour week) and, the theory goes, you can liberate enough work to fix unemployment.<br>The fallacy works because it is intuitively appealing. Many, if not most things in life can be shared in ways that are zero-sum: material objects, certainly, but also more intangible things like bandwidth or even “attention”. Yet assuming the same of “work” is fallacious, for the reason that “work” is a shorthand for a complex web of relationships and obligations between humans and institutions. Working more, or less, has an incidence on your income, your consumption, and then the work of someone else, in a dynamic relationship that has endless ramifications.<br>As such, the historical record has not been kind to the past Cassandras warning about external shocks (new tech, input of migrant labour, etc.) destroying or taking up all the jobs. And France did not beat unemployment.<br>Now, a very similar argument is being made, implicitly or explicitly, in the debate about AI and lawyers: legal work is a fixed quantity, some assume, and if AI can do instead of jurists, this will take the bread out of the latter’s collective mouth. Watch out, they say, as legions of junior lawyers are decimated by a simple AI routine; look out, they add, for the incredible competition LLMs will put on prices for everyone else. An entire industry is on the cusp of irrelevance, and good riddance, the hope goes.<br>But since I am on the record saying that we will have more, not fewer lawyers in the medium-term, picture me unconvinced. And a large part of my stance proceeds from the rejection of this “lump of law” fallacy.
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Law as an equilibrium
The first thing to point out is that “law” (or “legal work”, for which it’s even more obvious) is, like “work”, a shorthand to denote a much greater, much more complex set of things.<br>There are, evidently, the positive norms that apply to any subject thereof, the stuff of laws and codes. Then other, regulatory norms designed and enforced by regulators. As well, “private laws” between parties governing their relationships inter se, or self-imposed norms. Soft law as well, I guess. And finally (without pretending to be exhaustive) everything that lives in the penumbra (or however you want to call it) of the former, norms of conduct, expectations, ethics, etc.<br>And just as with work, touching the legal framework from one side has consequences across all the others. Here are a few examples:<br>The violation of one norm might engage other norms (e.g., “everything is securities fraud”);
Norms can be escaped or evaded, through technological or human means (e.g., tax evasion), calling for more norms to patch the loophole;
Relatedly, there are “loopholes” or “legal gaps” everywhere, if you listen to, I don’t know, anyone - decrying such gaps is the easiest way to become a TV anchor or commentator, and everyone to nod and applaud with their crab hands;
Interpretation drift, whereby every application of a norm slightly changes its meaning, requiring work to keep up and adapt; or
Jurisdictional layering, to ensure that one legal situation remains kosher in a “pluralist” world where you may, if you look hard enough, be subject to many, many different legal frameworks.
All these examples entail that whatever AI does to legal work, more such work is likely on offer, because labor laborem invocat. This stems, to some extent, from the fractal nature of the law, where - as we have discussed - there is no clear answer to what is “good enough”. But it also stems from the fact that several distinct forces - political, adversarial, economic - impact the dynamic equilibrium of the law at once, as we shall see.<br>The Jevons effect
The first vector is the typical Jevons effect, as applied to the cost of compliance.<br>Many norms nowadays are enacted through an enterprising norm-maker (a regulator, a legislator, anyone incentivised to create norms) meeting a latent demand (even if weak, fabricated or fantasised) for norms. This demand is, by default, maximalist: you want to regulate the heck out of it. But what prevents legislators from micro-managing everything ? To the extent they have some, common sense, but more generally, the feeling that a norm will be capable of being complied with.<br>Not that unworkable, uncompliable norms are never enacted; to the contrary,1 many laws and...