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Dave Hoffman

@hoffprof.bsky.social
3.6K followers 1.4K following 834 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 · 30/09/2026
Basically I think this is just descriptively not what happens at these speeches, having listened to many, even by federal judges. Even at graduation and convocation, where the very goal is to be banal, judges often say true and useful and interesting things!
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Nope. Prosser has us there too.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
No one knows anything ed.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Digging into these data, I ask who edits, whether concessions trade against rent, and whether particular form *families* are more or less likely to be edited.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
So sad when the great ones fall.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
IMHO, the most interesting finding is that landlord sophistication & efficient extraction go up together. One way you can show this? Leases from landlords with homemade forms tend to bunch their rent at even numbers. More experienced landlord calibrate rent more precisely.
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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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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 · 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
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
In response to @klonick.bsky.social's wrongheaded comment that my corn growing ahab-like situation had crowded out all other life on the farm, let me just point out that we're very close to making tomato jam time over here.
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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 · 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 · 21/07/2026
By alot.
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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 · 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 · 14/01/2026
Submit a paper!
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
But when pressed on a specific example, fewer were up for it, and the demographics flipped. Men, who had been relatively anti-breach in general, were pro-breach in the particular case. Something about the general nature of eliciting questions about promissory behavior was tripping everyone's wires.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
Here, we asked a general Q: is breach good, sometimes?, and then a more specific one, would I breach a particular agreement? Surprisingly, to us, most people reported saying that sometimes breach is good. They didn't look particularly formalist.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
The big idea is that the field's orientation is built on the litigated cases, which hold up an increasingly distorted mirror to commercial life. But -- contrary to the prevailing account -- that doesn't mean we need (or can) refashion doctrine to return us to the contracting practices of the 1800s.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
But real move of the paper is to connect this categorizing project with attitudes. Our thesis is that you learn from the deals you are in (which aren't randomly distributed!) The baseline here is that for many deal types, Americans are anti-breach formalists.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Other findings were less obvious: parents report doing more bigger-stakes contracting of all kinds. And black respondents were disproportionately likely to engage in gig economy contracting.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
But this isn't always true. Sometimes, as we show using a survey, being in some kinds of contracts (gig work) makes you more up for ignoring their explicit terms. That is, sometimes experience is a pragmatic teacher.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
We divide contracting life into three rough types: the old world (think, the opinions in the casebooks), the real world (aversive consumer contracts), and the new world (gamified gig contracting). One thing we see is that the new world contracts look *real* different than other types.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
For instance, here's two of dozens of charts and tables, offering a comparative sense of how common certain kinds of deals are, and how some of those experiences vary by race, gender and self-reported class.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Knew it.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
I think we're getting somewhere.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
A good article on this: columbialawreview.org/wp-content/u...
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
And the other, unjust enrichment claims regarding a surprisingly successful flashlight company.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
No, Luke. The shadow language came from the festival organizers themselves. palestinewrites.org/2023/09/15/l...
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 31/07/2023
One super cool thing we can do is show how pieces of evidence contribute to the model's confidence. Thus, in Stewart v. Newbury, the model reaches an outcome built on a contract and two different extrinsic pieces of meaning, one materially, and the other marginally, important.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 31/07/2023
And here's a way to get under the hood of a model: freezing it mid-sentence as it predicts the meaning of a pre-nup agreement in Famiglio v. Famiglio.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 31/07/2023
We explain the use, and deep the case, for LLMs in law: they can offer subtle predictions about the meaning of words in context. It's not just a chatbot. Here are multiple models describing the best reading of famous language from the 9th circuit's Trident case.
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Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 16/07/2023
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