After graduating from Stanford Law School, where he was Senior Article Editor of the Stanford Law Review and Senior Submissions Editor of the Stanford Journal of International Law, Professor Mikhail joined the law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. He then served as a judicial clerk to Judge Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Professor Mikhail's research interests include torts, criminal law, constitutional law, international law, jurisprudence, moral and legal philosophy, legal history, and law and cognitive science. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cornell University and was a Lecturer and Research Affiliate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A revised and expanded version of his Ph.D dissertation on "Rawls' Linguistic Analogy" has been published by Cambridge University Press: Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls' Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment.

Professor Mikhail has been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School, a Visiting Junior Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a visiting member of the Law Faculty at the University of Zurich. His research on moral psychology has been featured in Science, Der Spiegel, Boston Review, and other media outlets. His publications have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals, including Stanford Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Law and History Review, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychology of Learning and Motivation, and Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie. From January 2011 to July 2013, he served as Associate Dean for International and Transnational Legal Studies.