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Dave Hoffman

@hoffprof.bsky.social
3.6K followers 1.4K following 832 posts

William A. Schnader Prof. of Law at Penn Law Teaching & writing mostly about contracts, occasionally backyard birds. Against et al. Pro legal jargon. Neutral on legal process.

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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Can we at least all agree its morally licit and entirely within bounds to have AI draft noncommital email responses to undergrads seeking legal advice on their startups. Probably not, says @jdmortenson.bsky.social.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Jokes on you people, I have 20 in my tallis bag and I'm set for years.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Given all the talk about AI & law, you might be interested in this truly inspiring Yom Kippur sermon by (my) rabbi at Temple Beth Hillel, Ethan Witkovsky. It's about whether it's ok to write sermons using AI, and not incidentally the telos of scholarship. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqLF...
youtube.com
Artificial Intelligence and Human Spirit
YouTube video by Temple Beth Hillel - Beth El
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It seems real unfair that Ted Lasso (season 4) can make Ferris Bueller references but when I do so in class I'm considered to be hopelessly past my prime.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The CW is that form contracts can't be changed -- that's why they are called adhesion contracts, after all! But, looking at a sample of 25,000 leases, I found that around 10% of the time, tenants hand edit the terms of the bargain in their favor. profhoffman.substack.com/p/how-sticky...
profhoffman.substack.com
How Sticky Are “Adhesive” Contracts Anyway?
Estimating the negotiation rate of form contracts in a sample of leases
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Jonathan H. Adler @jadler1969.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Given all the (justified) concern about government attorney misconduct, why is there so little on here about the sanctions against lawyers in Philly DA Larry Krasner's office? One disbarred and one suspended from practice in federal court, as inquiry continues. www.inquirer.com/crime/paul-d...
inquirer.com
Who is the federal judge overseeing the case roiling Philly DA Larry Krasner’s office? And what will he do next?
U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond has a reputation as a stern, no-nonsense jurist. He is weighing what to do in a controversial post-conviction case marked by accusations of lawyer misconduct.
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KProfsBlog @kprofsblog.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
A periodic update on the two main contracts law Substacks. @hoffprof.bsky.social has been writing about leases and about the dignity of contract. @kimkrawiec.bsky.social explains why surrogacy is complicated and launches Season 7 of the Taboo Trades podcast. www.contractsprofblog.com/2026/09/cont...
Logo for Dave Hoffman’s Contracts’ Empire SubstackLogo for Kim Krawiec’s Taboo Trades Podcast
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Anyone teaching B2B or B2C agentic commerce problems in contracts? Lots to think about post Hugging Face, which I think puts some pressure on the checkout and payment mandate system that's being built...
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
New post digging into Philadelphia's residential leases. The bottom line, confirming earlier research, is that unenforceable & aversive terms are common, and there's no evidence that tenants get a price break for accepting bad law. The terms survive because they aren't tested.
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Ashley M. London @alondon.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I am an anti-AI professor. And I will boycott citations to AI-assisted papers. Easy. When you teach ethics, there is no other position.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Going to be interesting after anti-AI law professors adopt a certification regime against any AI use to see if they also try to boycott citation to AI-assisted papers. Would be a sensible extension of the intuition.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I decided to return to the eviction leases that I first wrote about in 2022, and used Claude and Haiku to analyze 25K Philly leases to show how they came to be, what role lawyers had in the process, and how landlords’ access to justice affected their tenants.
profhoffman.substack.com
The Residential Lease: A Natural History
A few years ago, Anton Strezhnev and decided to write about residential leases.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Just me, perhaps, but the fact that the neo brandeisian legal antitrust left relied so heavily on this guy's work seems bad?
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
New post, about Healy v. N.Y. Cent. & Hudson River R.R. Co, and turns that weren't taken in the evolution of the law of adhesion contracts. profhoffman.substack.com/p/dignity-us...
profhoffman.substack.com
Dignity Used to Matter to Contract Law
Maybe it should again?
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I keep on hearing from Israeli legal academics that they have experienced a post-October 7 bias against them in law review selection, and I have come to believe it's real. But also hard to prove, because the relevant national origin discrimination is kept inside editors' heads.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
In an interesting recent post, www.contractsprofblog.com/2026/08/firs..., @kprofsblog.bsky.social has this great observation about the perils of self-publishing casebooks. (Full disclosure: I disagree with most of the post's views about the (dis)utility of governing employee speech.)
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Is being able to refine AI-generated text an important long-term lawyer skill? I'm thinking about introducing a "correct this essay" question on an exam, having a students comment on infirmities an AI answer to a fact pattern. Presumably, errors range from finding hallucinations to plausible slop.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
This is just a day. Very, very close to the time in the summer when I actively have to work to forget that no one ever really wants tomato jam.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Honestly beats a @nytimes.com writeup. Thanks @chancethelawyer.bsky.social!
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I am officially ready for civilizational collapse, notwithstanding the doubts of all you corn-growing haters.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
In response to great reader feedback, @arbel.bsky.social and I have substantially revised the first draft of "Generative Gap Filling." ✍️New introduction and Part I text making clear what we're aiming at. 🥼New experiment exploring whether LLMs just hacked MCQs. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Generative Gap Filling
<div> Most contract litigation turns on contracts that imperfectly record parties’ bargains. When the parties’ dispute can’t be solved by interpreting the text
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
New paper alert: Mergers and Arbitrations. My co-authors and I have written a love-letter to the pragmatic jurists of the Delaware Chancery Court, who've built a product no one can easily beat. @chancethelawyer.bsky.social, you know what to do! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Lawyers might soon adopt a new contractual technology: choice of model clauses committing to particular LLM models as interpretative guides. Would these terms be enforceable? And what problems might they pose for courts and policymakers? Today's post: profhoffman.substack.com/p/are-choice...
profhoffman.substack.com
GPT, as Amended
Would choice of model clauses really be enforceable?
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Putting out a new, pro-Chancery, paper next week. Trying to figure out if the right marketing campaign is directed at @chancethelawyer.bsky.social exclusively, or Chancery's haters over on Twitter.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
With the help of a brilliant Penn rising 2L, Riley Hull, the Philadelphia Fair Lease has updated its FAQs to account for recent changes in law and policy. Having taken stock of those updates, I've been thinking about the benefits and costs of disclosure-centered housing policy.
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Yonathan Arbel @arbel.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
The showdown: Lawyers vs. LLMs on contract gap filling
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
🚨New paper w/ @ProfArbel, "Generative Gap Filling"🚨 SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... And a 🧵.
papers.ssrn.com
Generative Gap Filling
Contract law polices a line between interpretation, the recovery of meaning a text already holds, and gap filling, the supply of terms the text lacks. The bound
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
This is what Isaac Chotiner's interviews want to be. www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...
chronicle.com
Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized?
We asked Carolyn M. Rouse, head of the American Anthropological Association. She had a lot to say.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
For Contracts' Empire, I dug into Brendan Sorsby's NIL / liquidated-damages fight with Cincinnati, pending federal court in Ohio — maybe the first case to really test whether NIL "buyouts" are really disguised noncompetes. My bottom line: it's unlikely the court will reach the merits soon.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
From a certain point of view, agentic commerce may look like a litigators' dream: bots creating an evidentiary record of every thought they had, meaning that when deals go wrong lawyers will be able to nail down exactly how and why.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Garden is starting to earn its keep! @pamelasamuelson.bsky.social @klonick.bsky.social #cornisnext?
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
I know what you've been wondering. Can we tell which law firm wrote an M&A agreement by looking at their use of oxford commas and other syntactic choices? The answer is: not quite. But we can come pretty close! open.substack.com/pub/profhoff...
open.substack.com
Does Cravath Have A Drafting Accent?
CSM barely uses the Oxford comma, and never wavers. No other firm comes close
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James Fallows Tierney @jamesftierney.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
📃 New from me on SSRN: What do investors think of arbitration clauses with class waivers? Some scholars argue that requiring individual arbitration creates efficiencies that get partially passed through to consumers. But the magnitude and incidence of those cost savings are largely unstudied. 🧵/6
Abstract for an article called "The value of class-action waivers: Evidence from invalidation of the CFPB arbitration rule."
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
M&A transactions record the parties' goals and risk allocations... and the boilerplate of past contracts. In a new post I examine 25 years of deals for evidence of the adoption of new deal technologies, and their stickiness in the face of change. profhoffman.substack.com/p/hunting-fo...
profhoffman.substack.com
Hunting for Fossils in M&A Agreements
Mitu Gulati, Bob Scott and Steve Choi’s new book on Contract Hazards: Lawyers and Their Landmines is great fun.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Wasteful Bot-on-Bot disputes about customer service look inevitable. But what happens when the temporary compute subsidy goes away for consumers? In a new substack, I think about consumer law's long-term future.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Most of what's wrong with AI writing could be solved if it somehow it hoovered up the (lost) Television Without Pity archives and anchored on that text.
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Mithradates @mithradatesvi.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
This prediction re: AI assisted contracts is right on the target, and I think anyone who regularly drafts contracts ought to see it, because it suggests to me that most of us already have the technical expertise for what’s coming. From @hoffprof.bsky.social profhoffman.substack.com/p/the-declin...
But vague standards— "reasonable wear and tear," "sudden and accidental," "in the landlord's reasonable judgment"—are harder to attack because the fight becomes about applying the standard to facts the consumer (and thus the AI) doesn't fully have. So, if firms wanted to walk a self-protective line against AI bots, they might themselves try to avoid bright line rules and move toward standards.
My guess is the equilibrium looks more like bifurcation.
Firms will make the grounds for denial or exclusion in consumer contracts standard-like
—discretionary, fact-intensive, textually slippery, hard for an Al to attack on the face of the contract. And they will make the procedural preconditions more rule-like, more unforgiving, and more numerous. That is, we'd see a growth in strict notice windows, documentation requirements, insurance cooperation clauses, appraisal-process requirements, etc. I am skeptical there will be a net effect on litigation filing rates.
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Daniel Solove @daniel-solove.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Whenever I want to understand contract law, I turn to @hoffprof.bsky.social His post has fascinating thoughts on the impact AI will have on contracts. profhoffman.substack.com/p/the-declin...
profhoffman.substack.com
The Decline (and Fall) of Contracts' Empire?
The long-run of agentic contracting is likely to be quite weird
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
There's lots of chatter about how AI will result in more complete contracting and ever-more power for monopolist firms, but simultaneously is driving a rise in pro se litigation and self-help In a new substack post, I put those ideas in tension with each other.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Was thinking about the role of careful articulation in law -- obviously generated by writing T&P and clerkship letters. It does a ton of work. Judges, agencies, employers, professors writing either recs or papers all explain. And the length/depth of the explanation itself has weight..
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Appreciating the long-term worries, I still find Claude Code to be a miraculous life-hack that is making the production of scholarship vastly more enjoyable and substantively better!
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
I'm very excited to welcome @cburset.bsky.social to Penn's campus this coming fall! www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/18...
law.upenn.edu
Welcoming New Faculty
Legal historian and public law scholar Christian Burset joins the Penn Carey Law faculty.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Perhaps so -- lots of evidence that the constituency for the institution is real small at the Court. But a different perspective is that both SS and KBJ are making strategic, tactical and collegial errors. And SS realized it.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
State Courts continue their long, grinding, resistance to the Federal Arbitration Act (as interpreted by this generation's SCOTUS). I wrote about the latest from the front in Pennsylvania. substack.com/home/post/p-...
substack.com
"Fight the Empire!" Pennsylvania's Arbitration Resistance Cadres
On courts, institutional competition, and the limits of federal preemption
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
... And another season of putting out bougie grape jelly & oranges in the forlorn hope of a Baltimore Oriole fly-by begins. #birding
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
DE's Chancery Court is creating the most interesting contract doctrine in the country, as corporate actors increasingly contractualize their previously fiduciary relationships. This month, VC Will innovated in the law of remedy. I wrote about it. profhoffman.substack.com/p/the-protea...
profhoffman.substack.com
The "Protean Power of Equity" in Delaware Contract Cases
The most interesting contract doctrine in the country is being written by seven people in the First State.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
In this video, looking oddly disheveled, I talk to two of the smartest people in the AI-and-Law space, and double down on the value of LLMs for improving A2J and contract interpretation, whatever angsting law professors may say. www.adr.org/podcasts/ai-...
adr.org
How AI Is Changing Contract Law with Dave Hoffman
Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape one of the most foundational areas of legal practice: contract law. In this episode, Jen Leonard and Bridget McCormack speak with Professor Dave Hoffman...
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Greg Shill @gregshill.com · 25/02/2026
This is a great post. Commoditizing rote tasks makes the bespoke ones more valuable; in the case of contracts, to my mind that’s a case for (among other things) more commercially-minded legal training.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
New post, whistling past the graveyard of transactional practice. I ask: if AI is so good at turning nuggets of ideas into text, why would we write contracts down at all? substack.com/home/post/p-...
substack.com
Goals Aren't Agreements
Maybe the best contracts are the friends we made along the way
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
For a substack, I'm collecting terms about AI use (whether disclosure or warrants against it) in law review publication agreements. Please drop examples below if you are willing -- I think it's interesting to see how journals are (and are not) reacting to the revolution.
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