Are polarized courts dangerous for litigation? Evidence from French labor courts

Patents and Cumulative Innovation: Causal Evidence from the Courts

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow-on innovation? This paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit to control fo...

Handwriting Evidence in Federal Courts - From Frye to Kumho.

In federal courts, the admissibility of scientific expert testimony in the last century has been governed by three major standards. The first of these standards, the "general acceptance" test, arose from the 1923 Frye v. United States (Frye) and required that any technique or method introduced in court be generally accepted by the relevant community of scientists. The more liberal "relevancy" s...

Status Courts

Labor Courts, Nomination Bias, and Unemployment in Germany

Labor courts play an important role in determining the effective level of labor market regulation in Germany, but their application of law may not be even-handed. Based on a theoretical model of the legal process and a new panel data set, we identify a nomination bias in labor court activity – that is, court activity varies systematically with the political leaning of the government that has ap...

Optimal plaintiff incentives when courts are imperfect

The incentives of a plaintiff in a lawsuit are affected by a variety of legal rules. One leading example is the proportion of the fine imposed on the defendant that is awarded to the plaintiff. Another is the identity of the plaintiff himself: private litigants are motivated by the prospect of receiving damages, while government employed plaintiffs (such as public prosecutors and employees of r...