Law Commons^™

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, like enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods LLC illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically …

Court Capture, Jonas Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.

This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …

Ip Litigation In U.S. District Courts: 1994-2014, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

This Article undertakes a broad-based empirical review of intellectual property ("IP") litigation in U.S. federal district courts from 1994 to 2014. Unlike the prior literature, this study analyzes federal copyright, patent, and trademark litigation trends as a unified whole. It undertakes a systematic analysis of the records of more than 190,000 cases filed in federal courts and examines the subject matter, geographical, and temporal variation within federal IP litigation over the last two decades.

This Article analyzes changes in the distribution of IP litigation over time and their regional distribution. The key findings of this Article stem from an attempt …

The Case Against Federalizing Trade Secrecy, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

Trade secrecy is unique among the major intellectual property (IP) doctrines because it is governed primarily by state law. Recently, however, a number of influential actors — including legislators, academics, and organizations representing IP attorneys and owners — have proposed creating a private civil cause of action for trade secret misappropriation under federal law. Proponents assert that federalizing trade secrecy would provide numerous benefits, including substantive uniformity, the availability of a federal forum for misappropriation litigation, and the creation of a unified national regime governing IP rights.

This Article engages in the first systematic critique of the claim that federalizing …

Differentiating The Federal Circuit, Elizabeth I. Winston

Scholarly Articles

In 1982, Congress created the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Often referred to as an experiment, the Federal Circuit has flourished. Born again from the ashes of its predecessors, the aptly nicknamed Phoenix Court continues to grow in significance, stature, and strength. As it grows, however, the court remains rooted in its history and in its unique nature. This Article explores the Federal Circuit’s structure and its impact on the development of Federal Circuit jurisprudence. The Federal Circuit is distinguishable by more than its national jurisdiction – the very essence of the court sets it apart …