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Full-Text Articles in Law

Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz Nov 2008

Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz

Michigan Law Review

This Article examines whether U.S. district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction with experience, including the experience of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This Article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal …


The Claim Construction Effect, Lee Petherbridge Jan 2008

The Claim Construction Effect, Lee Petherbridge

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Claim construction refers to the task of construing, or interpreting, the words of patents' claims to establish the metes and bounds of a patent. Theoretically, the task of claim construction serves to operationalize the concept of "invention," which lies at the heart of the U.S. patent system.[...] Rather than focusing on the set of cases in which the Federal Circuit addresses claim construction, this study focuses on a set of cases defined by a different patent doctrine. The basic idea is to explore the impact of claim construction on other areas of patent law.[...] The hypothesis of the claim construction …