Looking to put together a panel on socio-legal studies in medical law for the Canadian Law and Society Association’s upcoming meeting in Nova Scotia. If you are interested in presenting on this panel, please submit an abstract to me before the end of 2025 so I can draft our panel proposal.

Looking to put together a panel on socio-legal studies in medical law for the Canadian Law and Society Association’s upcoming meeting in Nova Scotia. If you are interested in presenting on this panel, please submit an abstract to me before the end of 2025 so I can draft our panel proposal.

Classic yet alarming: the federal govt just posted in the Canada Gazette a proposal to fundamentally change drug regulation as we know it. Here's the link to the Gazette: gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/202...

This poetic/critical piece reflects on nine criminal prosecutions for suspected ‘illegal’ abortion in England that occurred between 2012 & 2025. This essay-meditation evokes the haunting, suffocation & cruelty imposed by the criminalisation of abortion. Read here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

I am not sorry. This is simply true. Academics should be able to write fluently and express themselves clearly and academics should do their own work. It’s literally our job. It’s what we trained until 22nd grade to do. This is a simple observation that should require no explanation or defense.

Important article by @timbousquet.bsky.social today in @halifaxexaminer.ca (as well as linked oped by Kate Ashley of Acadia + @aawayne.bsky.social) about very troubling move by NS govt decision to hire a private consulting firm to evaluate university performance.

My forthcoming book— For which I began research in 2006. Is now posted on the website for Princeton University Press. Cover will be added soon. The King’s Slaves: The British Empire & the Origins of American Slavery

“A judge has lifted an injunction that blocked legislation banning doctors from providing gender-affirming care to minors, ruling the province’s use of the notwithstanding clause to shield the law from court challenge removed the legal underpinning for the order.” calgaryherald.com/news/politic...

The AI generated suggestions (whatever they’re called) on MS word are dogshit. AI generally is dogshit, shoved down our throats.

There is still time to apply to the JELP Graduate Students Workshop!

So much of the commentary on the FWS judgment has been driven by reflexive responses to the outcome, but there are so many gaps and leaps in its reasoning that it will spawn litigation for years to come - @aoifemod.bsky.social and I flag some failings in judge craft: nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/ni...

Probably the single most important rule of writing is that you need to know the rules well enough to know when and why you're breaking them. Doing it by accident is almost never going to work out; doing it on purpose and with reason is the key to all great writing, imo

The coming years are going to reveal a lot more waste on 'AI' like this by our governments, to the tune of 10s of billions squandered on appalling nonsense, all to make rich Tech Bros richer.

canadians can't ever get ahead because two large pizzas comes to 90 dollars

This is very good and goes in front of my MA students next term for sure. It's a lot better than the various medium posts I've written but it's reassuring to see so many people arrive at the same answer after checking. No, AI is not capable of "replacing" historians. Not even close, wrong timezone.

My latest article, “The Legal Somatics of Body Bequests Before the Anatomy Act 1832”, is published in Mortality, an interdisciplinary journal on death and dying. In the article, I analyze the medico-legal history of 18th- and 19th-century body bequests in England and Ireland. doi.org/10.1080/1357...

discussed this in seminar yesterday, albeit with reference to “race science” generally. If you understand science as a historical phenomenon then the question is what was science then, not whether it would count as science now, and the implication is that what science is now is not forever, either

"When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47 percent drop in neural connectivity... their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage. Eighty-three percent of heavy AI users couldn’t recall key points from what they’d “written"...

Geneviève Bergeron, 21 Hélène Colgan, 23 Nathalie Croteau, 23 Barbara Daigneault, 22 Anne-Marie Edward, 21 Maud Haviernick, 29 Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31 Maryse Laganière, 25 Maryse Leclair, 23 Anne-Marie Lemay, 22 Sonia Pelletier, 28 Michèle Richard, 21 Annie St-Arneault, 23 Annie Turcotte, 20

On first glance, Bill 48 seems both open to exploitation by peace officers, because of its over broad definitions, and ineffective. I have a hard time imagining how involuntary treatment would have saved my younger brother’s life. I think he still would have died from an overdose, as he did in 2023.

Watch: Sask. introduces involuntary treatment legislation as fall sitting ends youtu.be/jAHUQZpzYKQ?...

Canada’s international enrollment has fallen nearly twice as sharply as in the U.S. We have an unprecedented opportunity to poach some of the best emerging talent across a range of dynamic fields, and our government is just choosing not to, and kneecapping our universities in the process.

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

This is Mr. Paworotti. His favorite Christmas song is Howl-lelujah. If you'll excuse him, his solo is coming up. 13/10 (TT: therealpaworotti)

There is growing consensus that so-called 'conversion therapy' practices are harmful and must be banned. But which legal mechanisms should be used to do this? My article (with Stuart Goosey), Criminalising “Conversion Therapy”, published in the MLR, takes up this urgent question shorturl.at/AHkfb

American ALS patient died alone after paying $84K US in pursuit of healing at controversial Sask. facility www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝘀 ⇢ CanadaHealthwatch.ca 🍁

First term of teaching at @usask.ca done. In holiday/book writing mode for the rest of the month. 🎅🏼

Pretty sure the Medical Profession Act 1981 does not authorize the College to discipline a non-member. The government needs to lay information and prosecute an offence under the Medical Profession Act 1981.

Yes, in my classes I've shifted a lot to in-class writing (critical analyses, tests). The one 'take home' assignment I kept is the traditional research paper, but with added elements (including documenting step-by-step how research sources were found) to try to mitigate AI use.

I do not like that universities feel the need to “brand” themselves. Find your “identity” as a department, they say. Revise your “mission.” I believe our mission is advancing knowledge in all areas. That hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

“The [Saskatchewan] government acknowledged to CBC that there seems to be some confusion on [the] point [of who prosecutes offences under the Medical Profession Act 1981], promising a review ‘to ensure there is clarity on who enforces the Act.’” The Crown. Pretty sure the Crown prosecutes offences.

Maddening more hasn't been done to stop this exploitive clinic that markets unproven BS. American ALS patient died alone after paying $84K US in pursuit of healing at controversial Sask. facility www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... Supplements to cure ALS? Feels criminal.

Prudence is thrilled that I’m working from home today.

Check out the latest SLSA Blog post! ‘Law, Drugs, and the Moving Body’ by Kate Seear, Maria Federica Moscati, Sean Mulcahy, and Alejandra Zuluaga www.slsa.ac.uk/post/law-dru...

If anyone has successfully explained to a STEM boss that, no actually humanities scholars don't need a team of postdocs to collect all the data for them & write their papers & it's completely normal to just... do all your work mostly by yourself with some peer insight & feedback, lmk what you said.

The @royalhistsoc.org is running a charitable donation campaign to fund the research of historians who lack support. The number of applications we're seeing is way up. I've been very lucky to have a career as a historian, I've donated, and I think this Christmas you should too. Pay it forward.

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Oh coooool look @joshuashaw.bsky.social has published his piece on body bequests prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832 and I know from when he presented it at KLS that this is absolutely fascinating stuff www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/9 I LOVE the intro chapter of this book on close reading. We do close reading in law, too. It shows concretely how close reading is done, in 5 steps: scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation and global theorizing.

The full final cover is in and I would just like to draw your attention to that slim elegant spine - you will be able to get through this bad boy over the course of a medium-length train journey and arrive at your destination freshly conscious of the alien lifeform that battens on our biosphere

My latest article, “The Legal Somatics of Body Bequests Before the Anatomy Act 1832”, is published in Mortality, an interdisciplinary journal on death and dying. In the article, I analyze the medico-legal history of 18th- and 19th-century body bequests in England and Ireland. doi.org/10.1080/1357...

Oooh I should add that it has attracted this very helpful endorsement quote:

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

“The voices that matter most – trans young people, their families, the clinicians who work with them and trans health experts in Aotearoa – have been clear: access to puberty blockers is crucial.” Young trans people need access to transition healthcare. We must listen to them, not to transphobes.

For a panel at the Canadian Law and Society Association’s (CLSA) annual meeting (10-12 June 2026), I invite papers from socio-legal scholars who research any aspect of medical law (panel to be called “Socio-legal topics in medical law”).

Call for papers: The Canadian Law and Society Association is holding its annual meeting on 10-12 June 2026 at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Abstracts (along with a 1-page CV) should be submitted by 30 January 2026. Details in English and French: www.acds-clsa.ca/uploads/1/2/...