Professor Hoffmann's areas of expertise include environmental law, federal Indian law, and natural resources law.  Her scholarship analyzes the systems governing natural resource uses on federal and tribal lands and explores the conflicts that arise from Constitutional and other legal challenges facing indigenous nations and indigenous peoples in the United States. She has also lectured and published extensively on the topics of energy development, mining, livestock grazing, and other extractive uses of public lands and tribal lands. Her recent book, law review articles, and amicus briefs have focused on some of the most high profile controversies at the intersection of environmental law and federal Indian law, including the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Bears Ears National Monument, and energy mineral withdrawals on public lands and submerged lands. 

Professor Hoffmann teaches a variety of classes, including specialty environmental law and restorative justice classes.  Her Utah Field Study class is taught on location in southern Utah and uses an experiential approach to teach students about the laws governing protected public lands (national parks and national monuments), unprotected public lands (BLM and state school trust lands), and the unique prospects for tribal environmental governance proposed by President Obama's proclamation creating the Bears Ears National Monument in 2016.  Her Truth and Reconciliation class uses Vermont's nascent efforts to reconcile state-sponsored human rights violations against Abenaki peoples as a framework for discussing Truth and Reconciliation in other North American regions and around the world. 

Prior to joining the faculty at Vermont Law School, Professor Hoffmann was in private practice at a large law firm in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work included general commercial litigation, administrative appeals, and state and federal natural resource cases. She represented a wide variety of clients in state and federal court, and before the Department of Interior’s Office of Hearings and Appeals.  Professor Hoffmann received her BA in Spanish literature with high honors from Middlebury College and her JD from the S. J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. In law school, she was a William H. Leary Scholar, the Richard L. Dewsnup Fellow in Natural Resource Law, and a member of the Utah Law Review.  Professor Hoffmann is licensed in Utah and Vermont and is admitted to the Vermont Supreme Court, the Utah Supreme Court, the federal district courts for the districts of Utah and Vermont, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  She is a member of the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and the American Law Institute.