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Full-Text Articles in Administrative Law
Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination-time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality.
Why De Minimis?, Matthew D. Adler
Why De Minimis?, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
De minimis cutoffs are a familiar feature of risk regulation. This includes the quantitative individual risk thresholds for fatality risks employed in many contexts by EPA, FDA, and other agencies, such as the 1-in-1 million lifetime cancer risk cutoff; extreme event cutoffs for addressing natural hazards, such as the 100 - year - flood or 475 - year - earthquake; de minimis failure probabilities for built structures; the exclusion of low - probability causal models; and other policymaking criteria. All these tests have a common structure, as I show in the Article. A de minimis test, broadly defined, tells the …