Articles
Does Agency Funding Affect Decisionmaking?: An Empirical Assessment of the PTO’s Granting Patterns
Jan. 28, 2013—Appendix This Article undertakes the first attempt to causally investigate the influence of funding on the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (“PTO”) decisionmaking. More specifically, this Article studies the influence of the PTO’s budgetary structure on the most important decision made by the Agency: whether or not to grant a patent. It begins by...
Judicial Review for Enemy Fighters: The Court’s Fateful Turn in Ex parte Quirin, the Nazi Saboteur Case
Jan. 28, 2013—The last decade has seen intense disputes about whether alleged terrorists captured during the nontraditional post-9/11 conflict with al Qaeda and affiliated groups may use habeas corpus to challenge their military detention or military trials. It is time to take a step back from 9/11 and begin to evaluate the enemy combatant legal regime on...
Products Liability and Economic Activity: An Empirical Analysis of Tort Reform’s Impact on Businesses, Employment, and Production
Jan. 28, 2013—For decades, advocates of tort reform have argued that expansive products liability stifles economic activity by imposing excessive and unpredictable liability costs on businesses. Although politicians aspiring to create jobs, attract businesses, and improve the economy have relied on this argument to enact hundreds of reforms, it has largely gone empirically untested. No longer. Using...
Symposium: Introduction
Nov. 26, 2012—
Truths We Must Tell Ourselves to Manage Climate Change
Nov. 26, 2012—
Constitutional Cacophony: Federal Circuit Splits and the Fourth Amendment
Oct. 24, 2012—Despite their many differences, Americans have long been bound by a shared sense of constitutional commonality. Federal constitutional rights, however, can and do often vary based on geographic location, and a chief source of this variation stems from an unexpected origin: the nation’s federal circuit courts of appeals. While a rich literature exists on federal...
Angry Judges
Oct. 24, 2012—Judges get angry. Law, however, is of two minds as to whether they should; more importantly, it is of two minds as to whether judges’ anger should influence their behavior and decisionmaking. On the one hand, anger is the quintessentially judicial emotion. It involves appraisal of wrongdoing, attribution of blame, and assignment of punishment—precisely what...