TY  - BOOK
AU  - Atkinson,Scott E.
AU  - Marco,Alan C.
AU  - Turner,John L.
TI  - The Economics of a centralized judiciary: uniformity, forum shopping, and the Federal Circuit
SN  - 00222186
AV  - HB73 JOU 
PY  - 2011///
CY  - Chicago
PB  - University of Chicago Press
KW  - Appellate courts
KW  - Data validity
KW  - Federal circuit courts
KW  - Federal district courts
KW  - Forum shopping
KW  - Litigation
KW  - Patents
KW  - Uniformity
KW  - United States courts
N2  - 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1086/597561
ER  -