Law prof. Books: Implied Consent & Sexual Assault; Sovereignty, Restraint & Guidance; Tenth Justice.
Saskatoon
Joined November 2011
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1. Get comfortable with statutes - and in particular the Criminal Code. You need to be able to sensibly parse statutory provisions even when no court has looked at them yet. And you will understand cases better when you independently examine the provisions they construe.
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Michael Plaxton retweeted
This is the right decision. Canada is already struggling with proper guardrails for and assessment of Track 2 cases. It would be incredibly irresponsible to open up a brand new track
Michael Plaxton retweeted
This, @SeanFraserMP, on the other hand, is a step in the wrong direction. It will introduce new dangers to Canadians and medical practitioners, and will introduce a whole new area of abuse. We encourage you to split the two items into two separate bills so that parliamentarians can move forward with protecting those with mental illness, and take the time needed to examine the dangers of advanced directives. There are far too many unanswered questions on the latter.
Michael Plaxton retweeted
A genuine victory and a worrying defeat all wrapped in one. A real, genuine, and good, stopping of a law that would have killed many who are particularly vulnerable. Ridding ourselves permanently of MAiD for mental illness is a genuine good and the minister should be congratulated on taking this stance. At the exact same time, introducing advanced directives, will expand MAiD and open up new doors for abuse that are genuinely harmful and heinous. Moreover, it wasn’t necessary to introduce this as part of the bill. Official @cardusca statement coming shortly.
LIVE: Ministers outline “next steps” for medical assistance in dying laws
➡️ow.ly/Ax6s50ZVuse
EN DIRECT : Des ministres présentent les « prochaines étapes » concernant les lois sur l’AMM
➡️ow.ly/gqtJ50ZVusc
#cdnpoli | #polcan
Michael Plaxton retweeted
It's frustrating that legal scholars feel the need to do this. The creative process of writing is hard, but it can be the most rewarding part of our jobs.
Relatedly, here's the abstract for my next piece, "Load-Bearing Constitutional Law."
"How Often Are Articles in Top Law Reviews Written In Part By AI?," by Julian Nyarko. The finding, based on Pangram AI detection software: Most 2026 articles in T14 journals have none, but a few have a decent amount, and one is majority AI-written.
reason.com/volokh/2026/09/07…
Michael Plaxton retweeted
“A university . . . . is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”
provost.uchicago.edu/sites/d…
Michael Plaxton retweeted
My lecture in the @mckercherllp lecture series at @UsaskLaw happening Mon Sept 28 - I will be saying some new things about the Cowichan case, the Gitxaala BC DRIPA case, and related matters
Michael Plaxton retweeted
My latest, on yesterday's important Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Trowbridge. Link below.
Michael Plaxton retweeted
Am I right in understanding that there was potentially very widespread cheating on the remote LSAT, and the company that runs the LSAT moved the LSAT to in-person in response but opted not to ID the cheaters— and law schools haven’t asked to know? abajournal.com/news/article/…
Michael Plaxton retweeted
Harvard knows all of this about Sherif’s views and still hired him. A testament both to Sherif’s brilliance and to Harvard’s openness to hiring academics with diverse views.
Huge news in the academic world. My superstar former student Sherif Girgis has been appointed to a tenured full professorship at Harvard Law School. Sherif, who is currently a professor at the excellent Notre Dame Law School, is the lead co-author (with Ryan T. Anderson and me) of *What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense*. He is a powerful defender of the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions, and a critic of gender ideology.
Sherif was graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, where he received prizes for the best thesis in ethics and the best thesis in philosophy. He also received the International Dante Prize. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he completed the BPhil in philosophy. He received a JD degree from Yale Law School where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, then clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit for Judge Tom Griffith and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Samuel Alito. He returned to Princeton where he earned his PhD in philosophy.
Congratulations to Harvard (and its distinguished Dean, John Goldberg--another former student of mine) for snagging a truly extraordinary young scholar and teacher. And congratulations to Sherif!
Michael Plaxton retweeted
In the last 24 hours I have encountered two different efforts to suppress my thoughtfully speaking out on issues. I may write about these in more detail in due course. But for now, I will just say that these efforts do not suppress me but actually lead me to say more.
Michael Plaxton retweeted
Huge news in the academic world. My superstar former student Sherif Girgis has been appointed to a tenured full professorship at Harvard Law School. Sherif, who is currently a professor at the excellent Notre Dame Law School, is the lead co-author (with Ryan T. Anderson and me) of *What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense*. He is a powerful defender of the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions, and a critic of gender ideology.
Sherif was graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, where he received prizes for the best thesis in ethics and the best thesis in philosophy. He also received the International Dante Prize. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he completed the BPhil in philosophy. He received a JD degree from Yale Law School where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, then clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit for Judge Tom Griffith and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Samuel Alito. He returned to Princeton where he earned his PhD in philosophy.
Congratulations to Harvard (and its distinguished Dean, John Goldberg--another former student of mine) for snagging a truly extraordinary young scholar and teacher. And congratulations to Sherif!
Professional update: This spring, I will join @Harvard_Law School’s faculty as a tenured professor, teaching constitutional law, jurisprudence, and related subjects. 1/11
Michael Plaxton retweeted
Truly the greatest thing for @Harvard_Law and especially our students. I loved our faculty already but this is a huge boost that's going to make us all smarter, and kinder too. A great day!
Professional update: This spring, I will join @Harvard_Law School’s faculty as a tenured professor, teaching constitutional law, jurisprudence, and related subjects. 1/11
Newman, advising the protocol droid on the ins and outs of seceding from the empire: "Now, they may ask if you think you've been treated unfairly. But this is a question to be approached with caution..."
I somehow wasn’t invited to last night’s @lucasmuseum gala of A-list celebs. But I was fortunate to be able to attend an earlier opening day and party for museum members on Labor Day weekend. Amazing to see the range of narrative art and celebrate opening of important museum.
Michael Plaxton retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Michael Plaxton retweeted
More than frustrated that a university administrator has turned a form that used to be 2 pages into one that is now 14 to 16 pages long. I only have to file on behalf of a couple of students but what a waste of time and energy
Michael Plaxton retweeted
Any way you want to look at this it’s insane:
“At its peak early this decade, at least 40,000 people in the city were being paid to do other people’s homework, researchers estimated”
Michael Plaxton retweeted
Excellent @BryanGarnerLaw @ABAJournal essay on how AI is changing what lawyers do.
Great read for law students and law faculty.
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If every lawyer can produce clean prose, clean prose will cease to impress. If every lawyer can generate a plausible first draft, the first draft is cheapened. And if every lawyer can produce a competent summary of the law, well, you get the idea.
The real work will be judgment.
And judgment doesn’t announce itself with good grammar. It appears in the choice of argument, the recognition of controlling authority, the treatment of inconvenient facts, the allocation of risk, the refusal to make an unnecessary concession, the decision to say less, and the ability to see what everyone else has missed.
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In law school, we need to move from teaching tasks AI is automating and focus on developing critical thinking and judgment while working with AI. From Day One, AI mentors and simulators can help law students learn more, faster and help them develop critical thinking and judgment. Law professors need to transform the way they teach and incorporate AI tutors, simulations, and other tools that they have customized and developed.
Working with AI will be a necessary component of exercising judgment, and we underestimate the capabilities of AI to produce aspects of what we today call judgment. Nonetheless, there will be a need for a human to steer the AI and be accountable, and there are unlimited emerging problems and scenarios where humans need to be deeply engaged and accountable.
Law students and faculty need to understand the difference between offloading work to AI, on the one hand, and iteratively co-creating with AI, on the other. Law schools on Day One need to introduce AI and teach law students to work with AI to be proficient in critical thinking and judgment at levels that are not possible without AI.
The full @BryanGarnerLaw @ABAJournal essay should be required reading for all law students and faculty: abajournal.com/columns/artic…