Law Commons^™

If Hindsight Is 20/20, Our Justice System Should Not Be Blind To New Evidence Of Innocence: A Survey Of Post-Conviction New Evidence Statutes And A Proposed Model, Paige Kaneb

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amici Curiae - 56 Professors Of Law And Economics In Support Of Petition For Writ Of Certiorari In Tc Heartland Llc V. Kraft Foods Group Brands Llc, No. 16-341, Colleen V. Chien, Mark Lemley, Brian Love, Arti K. Rai

Historical and Topical Legal Documents

28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) provides that a defendant in a patent case may be sued where the defendant is incorporated or has a regular and established place of business and has infringed the patent. This Court made clear in Fourco Glass Co. v. Transmirra Prods. Corp., 353 U.S. 222, 223 (1957), that those were the only permissible venues for a patent case. But the Federal Circuit has rejected Fourco and the plain meaning of § 1400(b), instead permitting a patent plaintiff to file suit against a defendant anywhere there is personal jurisdiction over that defendant. The result has been rampant …

Inter Partes Review: Current Thinking On What, When, Why, And How Much, Brian Love

Faculty Publications

Slide deck from a presentation as part of the Merchant & Gould's CLE program on Inter Partes Review.

Predictably Expensive: A Critical Look At Patent Litigation In The Eastern District Of Texas, Brian Love

Faculty Publications

In this Essay, we compare U.S. patent litigation across districts and consider possible explanations for the Eastern District of Texas’s popularity with patent plaintiffs. Rather than any one explanation, we conclude that what makes the Eastern District so attractive to patent plaintiffs is the accumulated effect of several marginal advantages — particularly with respect to the relative timing of discovery deadlines, transfer decisions, and claim construction — that make it predictably expensive for accused infringers to defend patent suits filed in East Texas. These findings tend to support ongoing efforts to pass patent reform legislation that would presumptively stay discovery …

Comparative Patent Quality, Colleen Chien

Faculty Publications

One of the most urgent problems with the US patent system is that there are too many patents of poor quality. Most blame the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) – its mistakes, overly generous grant rate, and lack of consistency. But, the quality and quantity of patents in force is the product of three sets of decisions: to submit an application of certain quality (by the applicant), to grant the patent (by the patent office), and to renew a patent and keep it in force (by the applicant/patentee). Startling, there is no consensus way to measure patent quality. This …

Recalibrarting Patent Venue, Colleen V. Chien, Michael Risch

Faculty Publications

For most of patent law’s 200-year plus history, the rule has been that patentholders are permitted to sue defendants only in the district they inhabit. In 1990, the Federal Circuit changed this by enlarging the scope of permissible venue to all districts with personal jurisdiction over the defendant. Since then, patentees have flocked to fewer districts, and in 2015, brought more than 40% of their cases in a single rural district with 1% of the US population, the Eastern District of Texas. Fueled in particular by concerns that non-practicing entities (NPEs), who bring the majority of cases in the Eastern …

Writing Tenure Review Letters, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

Tenure review letters are a crucial part of the tenure process, but academic communities don’t often discuss how to write them. This essay offers my top 10 suggestions for how to conceptualize and write helpful tenure review letters.

Comment To The Sec In Support Of The Enhanced Disclosure Of Patent And Technology License Information, Colleen Chien, Jorge L. Contreras, Carol Corrado, Stuart Graham, Deepak Hegde, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Historical and Topical Legal Documents

Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public understanding of the innovation economy has been expanded by a large stream of empirical research using patent data, and more recently trademark information this research is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the data it builds upon. In contrast with information about patents and trademarks, good information about IP licensing is much less publicly …

Randomly Distributed Trial Court Justice: A Case Study And Siren From The Consumer Bankruptcy World, Gary G. Neustadter

Faculty Publications

Between February 24, 2010 and April 23, 2012, Heritage Pacific Financial, L.L.C. (“Heritage”), a debt buyer, mass produced and filed 218 essentially identical adversary proceedings in California bankruptcy courts against makers of promissory notes who had filed Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy petitions. Each complaint alleged Heritage's acquisition of the notes in the secondary market and alleged the outstanding obligations on the notes to be nondischargeable under the Bankruptcy Code’s fraud exception to the bankruptcy discharge. The notes evidenced loans to California residents, made in 2005 and 2006, which helped finance the purchase, refinancing, or improvement of California residential …

Pay-For-Performance In Prison: Using Healthcare Economics To Improve Criminal Justice, W. David Ball

Faculty Publications

For much of the last seventy-plus years, healthcare providers in the United States have been paid under the fee-for-service system, where providers are reimbursed for procedures performed, not outcomes obtained. Providers, insurers, and consumers are motivated by different individual and organizational incentives; costs and burdens of patient care are shifted from one part of the system to another. The result has been a system that combines exploding costs without concomitant increases in quality. Healthcare economists and policymakers have reacted by proposing a number of policies designed to reign in costs without sacrificing quality. One approach is to focus on the …

The Disembodied Rule And The Rule Made Flesh: Propositions, Illustrations, And The Placement Of Citations, Stephen E. Smith

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

New Developments, New Ipr Strategies Before Ptab, Brian Love

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ptab Data Analytics: Looking Behind The Numbers, Amy E. Simpson, Brian Love, Kim Schmitt

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

To Improve Patent Quality, Let's Use Fees To Weed Out Weak Patents, Brian J. Love

Faculty Publications

This Essay is based on comments I submitted May 6, 2015 in response to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Request for Comments on Enhancing Patent Quality. It proceeds in two parts. First, I share two general observations about the PTO’s current slate of New Quality Proposals: specifically, it fails to include any reforms that apply post-issue or any reforms that exercise the PTO’s fee-setting authority. Second, building on these observations and two recent empirical studies of mine, I outline two proposals that I urge the PTO to consider: specifically, an increase in maintenance fees and a decrease in fees …

“A False Idea Of Economy”: Costs, Counties, And The Origins Of The California Correctional System, W. David Ball

Faculty Publications

Realignment in California comes at a time when the state’s prison system is expensive and overcrowded; the response has been to reevaluate and reconfigure the way counties use state prisons. Based on an original historical analysis of state archival records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a well as a review of secondary historical accounts of California’s prison system, I show that similar problems and policies were present at the state’s founding: issues of expense, overcrowding, and the county-state relationship help to explain the origins, size, and shape of the California prison system. California’s lack of money …

Request For Submission Of Topics For Uspto Quality Case Studies, Colleen Chien, Brian Love

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Harmony And Disharmony In International Patent Law, Colleen Chien

Faculty Publications

One of the purposes of the Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) is to harmonize standards and create a uniform climate for trade and investment. As lawmakers deliberate the terms of the deal, they must consider what the long‐term impact of agreeing to its sweeping provisions will be. As they do so, they should keep in mind that the gaps between the agreed‐upon principles and local implementation, and the differences between local implementation – some of them by design – are often quite great. Drawing upon the existing literature, this short essay provides a survey of the extent of harmony and disharmony in …

The Will As An Implied Unilateral Arbitration Contract, E. Gary Spitko

Faculty Publications

A consensus has begun to develop in the case law, the academic commentary, and the statutory reform movement that a testator’s provision in her will mandating arbitration of any challenge to the will should not be enforceable against a beneficiary who has not agreed to the arbitration provision, at least where the will contestant, by her contest, seeks to increase her inheritance outside the will. Grounding this consensus is the widespread understanding that a will is not a contract. This Article seeks to challenge both the understanding that the will is not a contract and the opposition to enforcement of …

The Social Relations Of Consumption: Corporate Law And The Meaning Of Consumer Culture, David Yosifon

Faculty Publications

A mature assessment of the society we are making for ourselves, and the legacy we are leaving to the future, must come to terms with consumer culture. Theoretical discourse, as well as common experience, betray persistent ambiguity about what consumerism means to and says about us. In this Article, I argue that this ambiguity can in part be explained by examining the social relations of consumption in contemporary society. These involve, crucially, the relationship between producer and consumer that is dictated by corporate governance law, and embodied in the decision-making dynamics of the directors who command corporate operations. The enigmatic …

Patent Litigation In China: Protecting Rights Or The Local Economy?, Brian Love, Christine Helmers, Markus Eberhardt

Faculty Publications

Though it lacked a patent system until 1985, China is now the world leader in patent filings and litigation. Despite the meteoric rise of the Chinese patent system, many in the West believe that it acts primarily to facilitate local protectionism rather than innovation. Recent high-profile patent suits filed by relatively unknown Chinese firms against high-profile foreign tech companies, like Apple, Samsung, and Dell, have only added fuel to the fire. Surprisingly, given how commonplace assertions of Chinese protectionism are, little empirical evidence exists to support them. This Article fills this gap in the literature by analyzing five years of …

What Would Happen To Patent Cases If They Couldn’T All Be Filed In Texas?, Colleen Chien, Michael Risch

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Glatt V. Fox Searchlight And The Rhetorical Value Of Inter-Circuit Dialogue, Stephen Smith

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Death Of Treaty Supremacy: An Invisible Constitutional Change, David Sloss

Faculty Publications

This book provides the first detailed history of the Constitution’s treaty supremacy rule. It describes a process of invisible constitutional change that has previously escaped the notice of historians and legal scholars. The traditional supremacy rule provided that all treaties supersede conflicting state laws; it precluded state governments from violating U.S. treaty obligations. Before 1945, treaty supremacy and self-execution were independent doctrines. Supremacy governed the relationship between treaties and state law. Self-execution governed the division of power over treaty implementation between Congress and the President.

In 1945, the United States ratified the UN Charter, which obligates nations to promote human …

Beyond Eureka: What Creators Want (Freedom, Credit, And Audiences) And How Intellectual Property Can Better Give It To Them (By Supporting Sharing, Licensing, And Attribution), Colleen Chien

Faculty Publications

What do creators want? Jessica Silbey’s book, the Eureka Myth, distills the answers she received to this question over the course of interviews with more than fifty filmmakers, photographers, hardware and software engineers, business executives working with pharmaceutical, medical device, and telecommunications companies, and others. While many purport to speak for creators, Silbey’s subjects speak for themselves, through long excerpts that appear throughout the book. In this book review, I combine their insights with other historical and modern empirical accounts to carry out the thought experiment of what an intellectual property system keenly attuned to the needs of creators – …

Regulation Of Lawyers' Use Of Competitive Keyword Advertising, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

Lawyers have enthusiastically embraced search engine advertisements triggered by consumers’ keywords, but the legal community remains sharply divided about the propriety of buying keyword ads triggered by the names of rival lawyers or law firms (“competitive keyword advertising”). This Essay surveys the regulation of competitive keyword advertising by lawyers and concludes that such practices are both beneficial for consumers and legitimate under existing U.S. law - except in North Carolina, which adopted an anachronistic and regressive ethics opinion that should be reconsidered.

Women's Sexual Agency And The Law Of Rape In The 21st Century, Michelle Oberman, Katharine K. Baker

Faculty Publications

This is an article about sex and rape and the messy determinations of consent that mark the boundary between the two. More specifically, the article evaluates the modern baseline presumption of non-consent in sexual encounters in light of different theories of sexuality (feminism on the one hand and sex positivism/queer theory on the other) and in light of how sexuality manifests itself in the lives of contemporary young people. We analyze sexting, media imagery and hook-up culture to find that neither feminism nor sexpositivism provide an accurate account of contemporary sexuality, but neither theory gets it all wrong either. The …