Substacks to Read This Weekend

I am once again interrupting my hiatus to bring you news that just can’t wait.

First, my go-to person on all arbitration-related matters, Tamar Meshel (below), has a new Substack, Arbitration Law Prof, where she provides capsule summaries weekly of arbitration cases from the United States and Canada. Tamar will provide you timely notice of new developments in arbitration law, and then I, perhaps 6-9 months later, will get around to blogging about the cases that seem most blogworthy. If you would like to be more up-to-date on developments in the law of arbitration, I highly recommend following Tamar’s Substack.

In other Substack news, Dave Hoffman has another remarkable post over on Contracts’ Empire.

This one contains reflections about Mitu Gulati, Stephen Choi, and Robert Scott‘s book Contract Hazards: Lawyers and their Landmines. We previewed the book here and discussed the book’s themes before, most recently here. We reviewed the book here. Professor Hoffman goes farther, presenting highly amusing evidence of how slow M&A transactional documents were to take note of email as an effective mode of communication, while they continued to reference telexes and facsimile machines (faxes). They retained language relevant only to faxes even after removing reference to faxes as an acceptable mode of communication.

The post is amusing because, as Professor Hoffman recognizes, this is a landmine that will never be detonated. Nobody will challenge the enforceability of a notice-by-telex clause because nobody is going to send notice by telex. Still, the inquiry supports Contracts Hazards broader points: lawyers are slow to add new language to their boilerplate if hat language is not highly salient and even slower to remove irrelevant language.