Dave Hoffman

This is a really useful service and a well-designed website!

Surprised random anti-Israel stuff wasn't addended as well.

It now is formatted as if the "Editors" wrote it. LOL, such classic nonsense.

Eh-- it's also 100% true that liberal (mostly conlaw and crimlaw) professors routinely opine about areas well outside of things they've written about, as if clerking for some judge gave a lifetime superpower to be expert on all things.

Of interest to @kprofsblog.bsky.social,who no doubt will find much to disagree with!

Ozymandias and the CFPB’s Doomed Regulation AA In January 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed Regulation AA, a sweeping rule aimed at boilerplate in consumer financial contracts.

New post, about the problems of performative consumer protection regulation.

profhoffman.substack.com/p/ozymandias...

The paper takes on questions of method, while offering the largest study of contracting practice in the literature.

We are super grateful for all the feedback we got on the old draft, and hope this one is loads better!

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Those environments—adhesive terms, automated enforcement, platform rules, and routinized non-negotiability—are themselves shaped by legal doctrine operating in the background. So it's a loop, with distributive and normative consequences.

We frame a core challenge to evaluating whether contract doctrine should track ordinary intuitions: endogeneity.

People do not form their intuitions about obligation by reading cases or absorbing doctrine but rather from learning about the contracting environments they repeatedly inhabit.

New(ish) draft, with Tess Wilkinson-Ryan and Emily Campbell, "Lessons In Contract."

The paper draws on an earlier circulating draft ("contracts for everyone") but has ~50% new text and 100% new orientation: what do we learn from K experience, and what does it mean for doctrine.

Submit a paper!

Wrestling’s Old-Time Contract Religion Ritual, commitment, and the work contracts once performed

New distraction from doomscrolling. What can wrestling teach us about what's missing in contract practice (and law) today?

open.substack.com/pub/profhoff...

The Restatement (Predicted) of Contracts? A half-baked experiment in Restatement by AI.

I consider those questions in a new substack, which also asks why the nearly 50-year old Restatement of Contracts is still pretty much right (in capturing caselaw) but entirely wrong (in matching contracts).

open.substack.com/pub/profhoff...

I got to thinking, in response to a provocation by Yonathan Arbel, about whether AI-hallucinated caselaw was possibly predicting doctrine that hadn't yet been written. If so, does it make sense to use ChatGPT to predict what the Restatement (3rd) of Contracts should or would look like?

Schools Are Using NIL Buyouts Instead of Noncompetes to Deter Athletes' Movement Courts should be skeptical of the trend

New post, on NIL and liquidated damages.

open.substack.com/pub/profhoff...

Not my best (puffery) article. Feeling sheepish about a superlative title.

In which I recant my best-titled paper.

profhoffman.substack.com/p/not-my-bes...

The Private Life of Abundance Maybe it's the common law that's stopping us from getting more of what we need.

What does abundance have to say about private law?

profhoffman.substack.com/p/the-privat...

What evidence is there that it works in this context? There ~2 schools that have succeeded in moving their academic reputation significantly without increasing their spend in the last fifty years. And many schools -- I can think of one local school with glossy magazines -- that beclown themselves.

I mean, I personally hate travel! But (almost) every place I've been to I think better of and I'm sure that informal conversations travel further than infinite comms emails if the goal is to get people to pay attention to what faculty are writing.

This is not obviously the right direction.

I might get rid of these faculty-focused communications entirely, and build & encourage thicker, in person, connections.

I truly have no idea!

I honestly think that you personally being research dean is doing a ton of good -- there's almost no value to those emails as currently designed.

How do you feel about law faculty scholarship emails?

The Evidence of How Arbitration Hurts Employees and Consumers is Mostly Vibes Why we could use better empirical research on the real world effects of the rise of arbitration.

New post, highlighting how little we know about whether arbitration's rise has hurt workers and consumers.

(Though it's effect on some kinds of class-adjudication seems clear enough.)

open.substack.com/pub/profhoff...

Consumer Contracts are Fairly Readable, Suprisingly Sloppy, and Sometimes Irrelevant Recent papers that changed the way I thought about contract law

New substack post, summarizing three recent papers that changed how I thought about contracting law and policy.

profhoffman.substack.com/p/consumer-c...

Every minute you send preparing to write is a minute you don't have to spend later adding parentheticals because you won't have time or interest, it is known.

I'm not sure if it's a big deal or not, I just started to read the relevant warrant. People get arrested in this country (wrongly and rightly) all the time. That it happened to a judge doesn't mean this is an iron curtain descending on Europe.

United States v. Joseph (2019) - Wikipedia

Judge Joseph was indicted and charges were eventually dismissed two years later.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...