Dave Hoffman

This seems so obviously correct I'm boggled that anyone could disagree and yet here we are!

The "disclosure line" is the line that disclosure cures, or that which requires disclosure?

My precise claim was that lots of colleagues at lots of schools have told me that they put their own abstract text into Claude and it made suggestions about how to polish it and they took them, presumably with various degrees of modification. Your view is that this is wrong?

Well, many people pay professional editors! Or they have people in the building offer comments and to take them, whether large bore (this introduction needs this order) or small (rewrite this sentence). It's a common practice to disclose these interventions, but you maybe think illegitimate?

Pushing by posting!

What it was polished by AI -- or AI made suggestions on improvement and you took phrases? Is this sort of like the norm of thanking people who gave comments in the star footnote?

I think these are both wrong, though for different reasons, but the fact that such big names are pushing these ideas makes me wonder why more journals don't follow the warranty model. Neither Columbia nor Cornell, for instance, says a thing about AI use!

While @jamalgreene.bsky.social makes more of a moral/stolen valor claim, which it strikes me could be easily resolved using disclosure.

bsky.app/profile/jama...

Interesting gamut of takes against using AI to draft paper abstracts (and perhaps generally).

@jtlg.bsky.social's claim is functional: you'll do it better if you do it yourself, and if you don't do it yourself you'll never learn to be better. This strikes me as advice best fit for junior scholars.

I am finding the claim here slippery. Let's just say that someone has spent a ton of timet trying to write an abstract and they think it's dull. They ask Claude to draft one and they think it's just better than what they produced. Is it wrong to use that? Why?

There are several thousand law professors out there. Many are operating under resource (and time constraints) that make this kind of artisanal approach to production more challenging. Some use professional editors. Is that also a shortcut that suggests they've lost the plot?

And maybe you in fact do have a natural talent for it. Or maybe you don't write good abstracts! (Though I think you do.). There's lots of empirical claiming here that I just can't get on board with!

I too am attracted to this view of the world. But there are lots of people who also have spent years at this job who obviously just don't agree that they are getting better as you suggest. Their righteous goal is to have work they've worked on read and shared. I personally wouldn't call them lazy.

I don't know what to tell you James, maybe people lack your self-confidence in being able to write catchy text?

My personal view is that this is the last thing I'd want to give up, but also I wouldn't judge others who think they aren't great at this piece of the production.

You maybe take a look at this, also proposing a match...

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

Well, this would a hard one online, as I see Senator Fetterman much more positively than you do. But in person sometime, absolutely!

I think this is a misread of the electorate, and what Lamb was selling, but YMMV.

To the extent the below intends to make an empirical claim, it would help to know what % of self-identified jews (narrowed by UCLA affiliates?) have to not think of Israel as identity-constitutive to for that number to have legal purchase.
bsky.app/profile/fish...

I couldn't disagree more with the framing and conclusions of this thread.

Particularly, I wonder about the leveraging of an asserted "deep division" about the importance of Israel to Jews in considering Title VII legal actions.

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.

Thanks!

Goals Aren't Agreements Maybe the best contracts are the friends we made along the way

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-...

A pro-natal policy!

Again, I can only go by my own experience. The sentiments by law professors I see here w/out pushback is pervasive and gross.

And the twitter rancid stuff is mostly bots for people for whatever reason have decided to drink from the sewer hose.

I have no idea what you are seeing on twitter, or why, but my feed there is AI & sports. Whose eyes are you going to believe anyway?

In terms of brain rot, the group think for law professors leading them to truly unfortunate views is a locally bad treatment. But I see much more antisemitism on here than on there, mostly because of LPE law faculty that I happen to follow here but who have left there.

Gotta say, it seems (much) worse to be here every time I pop in.

Some skepticism about the calls for more required experiential learning in legal education — Excess of Democracy Last summer, I offered a lengthy critique of the ABA’s proposal to dramatically increase the amount of “experiential” learning requirements in legal education. The critique focused on three main ...

Important challenge lodged by Derek Muller to the ABA Council on Legal Education's proposals on forced experiental education. The ABA has spent a decade lurching from one disaster to another, and looks to be about to step again on its own rake.

excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2026/2/...

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.

Yeah, I don't think that the choice of law clause works perfectly -- though firms try this as arbitrage for noncompetes, ultimately for most things you are going to want the state's own courts to enforce the deal against fraud/tort suits and they are hostile to this gamesmanship.

But one just requires New York or California to act, the other a trifecta and 60 votes in the senate.