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Full-Text Articles in Law
Technically Speaking, Does It Matter? An Empirical Study Linking The Federal Circuit Judges' Technical Backgrounds To How They Analyze The Section 112 Enablement And Written Description Requirements, Dunstan H. Barnes
Chicago-Kent Law Review
Patent cases are decided exclusively by federal judges, who—unlike patent attorneys appearing before the United States Patent and Trademark Office—are not required to have any scientific or technical qualifications. The present empirical study explores whether there is a correlation between the technical backgrounds of judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and these judges’ analysis of the enablement and written description patent requirements under 35 U.S.C. § 112. The results indicate that Federal Circuit judges with technical backgrounds are more likely than their non-technical peers to reverse lower courts, but not significantly more likely to …
Hyperactive Judges: An Empirical Study Of Judge-Dependent "Judicial Hyperactivity" In The Federal Circuit, Ted L. Field
Hyperactive Judges: An Empirical Study Of Judge-Dependent "Judicial Hyperactivity" In The Federal Circuit, Ted L. Field
Ted L. Field
This article presents an empirical study of the extent to which individual judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit—which has exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals—engage in what William C. Rooklidge and Matthew F. Weil call “judicial hyperactivity.” This article defines “judicial hyperactivity” as a form of judicial activism in which a judge improperly “elevate[s] his or her judgment above that of another constitutionally significant actor (e.g., Congress, the President, [or] other Article III courts),” where this improper behavior is not necessarily driven by politics or ideology as is traditional judicial activism. This study considers the extent …