Legal Priorities Project

Support our mission to conduct legal research that tackles the world's most pressing problem, and to build a global community of legal scholars who work to protect the interests of future generations. You can get in touch with us to understand how your gift can help us reach these goals.

We currently focus on four cause areas: Law and governance of advanced artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, institutional design, and meta-research. Our research is influenced by the principles of effective altruism and the longtermism paradigm.

- Our Goals -
Foundational Research: Our primary goal is to conduct foundational research. By doing so, we aim to determine which problems legal researchers should work on in order to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. We refer to this as “meta-level research.” We also conduct research on the identified problems, which we call “object-level research.” Our approach focuses on the protection of future generations.

Field Building: We aim to establish “legal priorities research” as a new research field. In particular, we aim to introduce longtermism – the view that the primary determinant of the value of our actions today is how those actions affect the very long-term future – to legal academia. We want to convince more legal academics to work on research projects that positively shape the long-term future.

Community Building: We aim to build a global community that shares our concern for the long-term future. We want to bring together researchers and policy-makers at every level of seniority. We also aim to educate a new generation of researchers on how to use the law to protect future generations.

Informing Policy: In order to inform policy decisions, we are committed to engaging in non-research activities and to conducting research that could positively shape the long-term future while also having near-term policy implications. We also encourage top legal talent to work in policy and bring a longtermist perspective to policy-making.