Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Basically 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! 000
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Digging 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. 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 02/09/2026IMHO, 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. 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 02/09/2026New 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. 253
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 25/08/2026Just me, perhaps, but the fact that the neo brandeisian legal antitrust left relied so heavily on this guy's work seems bad? 010
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 06/08/2026In 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.) 4104
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 03/08/2026This 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. 240
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Honestly beats a @nytimes.com writeup. Thanks @chancethelawyer.bsky.social! 162
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/07/2026In 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. 120
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/07/2026I am officially ready for civilizational collapse, notwithstanding the doubts of all you corn-growing haters. 6381
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 28/07/2026New 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.... 5135
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/06/2026Garden is starting to earn its keep! @pamelasamuelson.bsky.social @klonick.bsky.social #cornisnext? 020
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 040
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 13/12/2024But 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. 000
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 13/12/2024Here, 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. 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024The 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. 110
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024But 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. 000
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024Other 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. 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024But 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. 163
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024We 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. 131
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 12/12/2024For 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. 140
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 29/11/2024A good article on this: columbialawreview.org/wp-content/u... 12813
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 26/11/2024And the other, unjust enrichment claims regarding a surprisingly successful flashlight company. 000
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 18/10/2023No, Luke. The shadow language came from the festival organizers themselves. palestinewrites.org/2023/09/15/l... 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 31/07/2023One 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. 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 31/07/2023And 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. 100
Dave Hoffman @hoffprof.bsky.social · 31/07/2023We 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. 100