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Martin Lapotka: Rawlsian AI for Fairer Contracts | Vancouver AI April 2026

· 15:54

What if you had to write a contract without knowing which side you'd end up on? Martin Lapotka (PhD ML, Mozilla alum) applied John Rawls' veil of ignorance to…

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Published:  ·  15:54

What if you had to write a contract without knowing which side you'd end up on?

Martin Lapotka (PhD ML, Mozilla alum) applied John Rawls' veil of ignorance to AI-driven legal contract negotiation — and it works.

The architecture: a parser extracts facts from both parties. Two reviewer agents see only the facts, NOT which party they represent. An arbiter agent iterates. 400–500 simulations per contract using open-source models on a 2013 MacBook Pro. Results stable to gender and name permutations. Three practising lawyers gave it a pass.

The intelligence isn't in the LLM. It's in the design of information flows between agents.

Peer-reviewed paper at the First Agentics Conference (October 2025, Marbella). Open-source. Fork it.
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