Bulletin n. 3/2009
January 2010
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Scott E. Atkinson, Alan C. Marco, and John L. Turner
    The Economics of a Centralized Judiciary: Uniformity, Forum Shopping, and the Federal Circuit
    in Journal of Law and Economics (The) , Volume 52, Number 3 ,  2009
    In 1982, the U.S. Congress established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) as the sole appellate court for patent cases. This court was created ostensibly to eliminate inconsistencies in the application and interpretation of patent law across federal courts and thereby mitigate the incentives of patentees and alleged infringers to forum shop for a preferred venue. We perform the first econometric study of the extent of nonuniformity and forum shopping in the pre‐CAFC era and of the CAFC’s impact on these phenomena. We find that in patentee‐plaintiff cases the pre‐CAFC era was indeed characterized by significant nonuniformity in patent validity rates across circuits and by forum shopping on the basis of validity rates. We find weak evidence that the CAFC has increased uniformity of validity rates and strong evidence that forum shopping on the basis of validity rates ceased several years prior to the CAFC’s establishment.
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