Ideology and exceptionalism in intellectual property: An empirical study

California Law Review

Volumn 97, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 801-856

  Sag, Matthew ^a   Jacobi, Tonja ^b   Sytch, Maxim ^c  

^a DEPAUL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 57849131748     PISSN: 00081221     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (336)

1. See, e.g., KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U. S. 398 (2007);
2. Medlmmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U. S. 118 (2007);
3. eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L. L. C., 547 U. S. 388 (2006).
4. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law 1 (1881) ("The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.").
5. See, e.g., Jeffrey A. Segal & Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (1993) [hereinafter Segal & Spaeth, The Attitudinal Model] (finding the attitudinal model predicts 76% of cases correctly in search and seizure cases);
6. Richard L. Revesz, Environmental Regulation, Ideology, and the B. C. Circuit, 83 Va. L. Rev. 1717 (1997) (finding that ideology significantly influences judicial decision-making and finding further that judges' votes are also greatly affected by the party affiliation of the other judges on the panel in environmental cases). For additional examples, see notes 17-23. The attitudinal model is discussed in more detail infra Part LA.
7. See, e.g., Jeffrey A. Segal, Separation-of-Powers Games in the Positive Theory of Congress and Courts, 91 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 28 (1997) (reviewing the attitudinalist literature and arguing the attitudinal model has strong empirical support, whereas the empirical evidence of strategic models is problematic);
8. Jeffrey A. Segal & Harold J. Spaeth, The Influence of Stare Decisis on the Votes of United States Supreme Court Justices, 40 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 971 (1996) (showing Supreme Court justices decide cases according to their pre-existing revealed preferences in 90.8% of cases, and in only 9.2% of cases did a justice switch to the position established in the landmark precedent; concluding stare decisis does not strongly influence Supreme Court justices).
9. See infra Part I. B.
10. See Bronwyn H. Hall & Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The Patent Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Study of Patenting in the U. S. Semiconductor Industry, 1979-1995, 32 Rand J. Econ. 101, 101-28 (2001);
11. Jean O. Lanjouw & Josh Lemer, The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: A Survey of the Empirical Literature, 49/50 Annales D'Economie Statistique 223, 223-46 (1998);
12. Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 Yale L. J. 283 (1996).
13. Two prior studies partially address this question. However, they are both narrow in scope and have null results, from which no conclusive inferences can be drawn. Barton Beebe's study of the application of the Polaroid factors in trademark cases calls attention to the possibility that political ideology might affect judicial decision-making in this context but finds no significant effect. See Barton Beebe, An Empirical Study of the Multifactor Tests for Trademark Infringement, 94 Calif. L. Rev. 1581 (2006). Likewise, Kimberly Moore's study of patent claim construction appeals finds no significant difference in how judges appointed by Republicans and judges appointed by Democrats construe patent claims, nor any discemable difference in their tendencies to affirm or reverse district court claim constructions.
14. See Kimberly A. Moore, Are District Court Judges Equipped to Resolve Patent Cases?, 15 Harv. J. L. & Tech. 1 (2001). Polk Wagner and Lee Petherbrige analyze whether Federal Circuit judges follow a methodology that is either "procedural" or "holistic" in their claim construction jurisprudence. Such differences in methodology could be said to be ideological in the most general sense, but they do not equate to the study of political ideology undertaken here.
15. See R. Polk Wagner & Lee Petherbridge, Is The Federal Circuit Succeeding? An Empirical Assessment of Judicial Performance, 152 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1105 (2004). Note also that John Allison and Mark Lemley considered this question in their review of patent validity decisions in the Federal Circuit, but did not pursue it because Republican-appointed judges accounted for 92.3% of opinions in their sample.
16. See John R. Allison & Mark A. Lemley, How Federal Circuit Judges Vote in Patent Validity Cases, 27 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 745 (2000).
17. There is no strict categorization of economic cases, but most scholars seem to agree on what is encompassed by the term. Topics other than those listed that would constitute economic cases include bankruptcy, corporate law issues generally, and commercial contracting. See infra notes 24-29 and accompanying text.
18. See Jeffrey A. Segal & Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited (2002) [hereinafter Segal & Spaeth, The Attttudinal Model Revisited];
19. Segal & Spaeth, The Attitudinal Model, supra note 3;
20. see also Lee Epstein et al., The Political (Science) Context of Judging, 47 St. Louis U. L. J. 783 (2003) (providing an overview of various studies);
21. Daniel R. Pinello, Linking Party to Judicial Ideology in American Courts: A Meta-analysis, 20 Just. Sys. J. 219 (1999) (providing an overview of various studies); infra notes 17-29 and accompanying text.
22. Lee Epstein & Jeffrey A. Segal, Trumping the First Amendment?, 21 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 81, 85 (2006) ("[I]n virtually all political science accounts of Court decisions, ideology moves to center stage.").
23. Id.
24. see also Richard A. Posner, What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Everybody Else Does), 3 Sup. Ct. Econ. Rev. 1 (1993) (suggesting judges seek to maximize income and leisure in addition to other sources of utility).
25. Epstein & Segal, supra note 10, at 85-86 (footnote omitted).
26. See, e.g., Harry T. Edwards, Essay, Collegiality and Decision Making on the D. C. Circuit, 84 Va. L. Rev. 1335 (1998).
27. See H. W. Perry, Jr., Deciding to Decide (1991).
28. See Posner, supra note 11.
29. See, e.g., Lee Epstein & Jack Knight, The Choices Justices Make 22-55 (1998);
30. C. Herman Pritchett, The Roosevelt Court xii-xiii (1948);
31. Segal & Spaeth, The Attitudinal Model, supra note 3.
32. See, e.g., Tracey E. George & Lee Epstein, On the Nature of Supreme Court Decision Making, 86 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 323 (1992).
33. See, e.g., Epstein & Segal, supra note 10 (finding that although generally the more liberal a justice, the more likely she or he will favor litigants alleging abridgment of First Amendment rights, liberal justices are no more likely than their conservative counterparts to uphold First Amendment claims where other values, such as privacy and equality, are prominently at stake; if anything, conservatives are more likely and liberals are less likely to vote in favor of speech, press, assembly, or association claims).
34. See, e.g., Segal & Spaeth, The Attitudinal Model Revisited, supra note 9, at 316-20.
35. See, e.g., Frank B. Cross & Emerson H. Tiller, The Three Faces of Federalism: An Empirical Assessment of Supreme Court Federalism Jurisprudence, 73 S. Cal. L. Rev. 741 (2000) (finding that ideology dominates questions of institutional federalism);
36. see also David B. Spence & Paula Murray, The Law, Economics, and Politics of Federal Preemption Jurisprudence: A Quantitative Analysis, 87 Calif. L. Rev. 1125 (1999) (finding that federal judges decide preemption cases partly based on ideology, but constrained by the facts and the legal context, and not necessarily monolithically based on party affiliation);
37. but see Michael S. Greve & Jonathan Klick, Preemption in the Rehnquist Court, 14 Sup. Ct. Econ. Rev. 43, 86 (2006) (finding that preemption cases are multi-dimensional and are unlikely to yield clear confirmation for either an "attitudinal" or a "legal" model of judicial behavior).
38. Donald W. Crowley, Judicial Review of Administrative Agencies: Does the Type of Agency Matter?, 40 W. Pol. Q. 265, 276 (1987) (finding that Justice Rehnquist consistently favored conservative administrative determinations and that Justice Brennan favored liberal outcomes).
39. See, e.g., Frank B. Cross & Emerson H. Tiller, Essay, Judicial Partisanship and Obedience to Legal Doctrine: Whistleblowing on the Federal Courts of Appeals, 107 Yale L. J. 2155 (1998) (reviewing administrative regulations under a deferential Supreme Court rule likewise found a significant ideological effect);
40. Pinello, supra note 9, at 236 (a study of circuit court decisions in several areas found significant, but varying, effects of panel ideology on decisions);
41. Revesz, supra note 3 (finding a pronounced difference in the decisions of judges appointed by Democratic presidents and those appointed by Republicans in D. C. Circuit rulings in environmental regulation cases).
42. See Cass R. Sunstein et al., Essay, Ideological Voting on Federal Courts of Appeals: A Preliminary Investigation, 90 Va. L. Rev. 301, 305 (2004). The areas were abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, capital punishment, Commerce Clause challenges to congressional enactments, the Contracts Clause, criminal appeals, disability discrimination, industry challenges to environmental regulation, piercing the corporate veil, race discrimination, sex discrimination, and claimed takings of private property without just compensation. The three areas where an effect could not be established were criminal appeals, takings claims, and Commerce Clause challenges to congressional enactments.
43. Id. at 306;
44. see infra notes 147-150 and accompanying text (discussing the limitations of the party of the appointing president as a measure of judicial ideology).
45. Nancy Staudt et al., The Ideological Component of Judging in the Taxation Context, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1797, 1799 (2006).
46. E. Thomas Sullivan & Robert B. Thompson, The Supreme Court and Private Law: The Vanishing Importance of Securities and Antitrust, 53 Emory L. J. 1571, 1572 (2004).
47. Id.
48. See Staudt, supra note 24 (finding no effect for ideology in tax cases in general, but finding that ideology is significant in the sub-set of corporate tax cases).
49. See Nancy C. Staudt, Modeling Standing, 79 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 612, 647 (2004).
50. See Daniel M. Schneider, Using the Social Background Model to Explain Who Wins Federal Appellate Tax Decisions: Do Less Traditional Judges Favor the Taxpayer?, 25 Va. Tax Rev. 201, 230-34 (2005).
51. See Beebe, supra note 7.
52. See Moore, supra note 7.
53. A null result in a statistical study means that an effect cannot be established. However, the failure of regression analysis to reject a null hypothesis should not be taken to indicate that the null hypothesis is true. See Robert M. Liebert & Lynn Langenbach Liebert, Science and Behavior 92 (4th ed. 1995). Thus Beebe and Moore's studies do not establish IP's exceptionalism, rather they simply fail to establish the effect of judicial ideology in each of their subfields.
54. See Paul H. Edelman et al., Measuring Deviations from Expected Voting Patterns on Collegial Courts (2d Ann. Conf. on Empirical Legal Stud., Working Paper 2007), available at http://papers.ssm.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id= 998297 (suggesting, among other possibilities, that copyright cases often involve very technical legal questions and are less clearly ideological).
55. Neil M. Richards, The Supreme Court Justice & "Boring" Cases, 4 Green Bag 2D 401, 403 (2001).
56. Id. at 403-08.
57. Staudt et al., supra note 24, at 1811.
58. Id.
59. Id. The United States Supreme Court Judicial Database is a widely used database of Supreme Court opinions developed by Harold J. Spaeth. See Harold J. Spaeth, The Original U. S. Supreme Court Judicial Database, http://www.cas.sc. edu/poli/juri/sctdata.htm (last visited Sept. 19, 2008). We discuss this coding in more detail infra Part III. A.
60. Staudt et al., supra note 24, at 1802.
61. Id. at 1812.
62. See id. at 1815-20.
63. See, e.g., Craig Allen Nard & R. Polk Wagner, Patent Law 33 (2008) ("As of 2006, eight of the twelve active judges [on the Federal Circuit] were appointed by Republican Presidents, and four by Democrats-though given that patent law issues rarely separate neatly along political party lines, this statistic is of only limited relevance.");
64. James E. Rogan, Foreword, Intellectual Property and the Challenge of Protecting It, 9 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y xv, xvi (2004) (relating Rogan's personal experience that intellectual property issues are rarely partisan: "[B]attle lines typically did not break down along Republican or Democrat lines: when IP warfare erupted, it tended to be a battle between those who understood the importance of intellectual property, and those who did not");
65. William Patry, Does Ideology Matter in Copyright?, The Patry Copyright Blog, http://williampatry.blogspot.com (Dec. 14, 2005, 7:17 EST) (questioning whether there is an ideology of copyright in a functional sense and whether ideologies of copyright have ever had any demonstrable impact). The strength of this belief is aptly demonstrated by Ann Bartow, who declares in a recent article that "[identification as a Democrat or Republican does not provide too much guidance or create too many expectations about a person's views of intellectual property issues."
66. Ann Bartow, When Bias is Bipartisan: Teaching About the Democratic Process in an Intellectual Property Law Republic, 52 St. Louis U. L. J. 715, 715 (2008). Curiously, Bartow's statement is followed immediately by a footnote to an earlier version of this Article.
67. Id. at 715 n. 2. Bartow dismisses our findings-which contradict her assertion-by arguing that we do not have sufficient evidence that the view we label IP exceptionalism actually exists.
68. Id. We are indebted to Bartow for providing us with such a compelling illustration of the exceptionalist view.
69. See Melvin Simensky, Does the Supreme Court Have a "Liberal" or "Conservative" Intellectual Property Jurisprudence?: An Evening with Kenneth Starr & Martin Garbus, 11 Media L. & Pol'y 116, 116 (2003) (quoting Kenneth Starr as rejecting the notion that the Supreme Court is ideological and arguing that the number of unanimous decisions on the Supreme Court "bespeaks the underlying and, in many respects, overriding professionalism of this very lawyerly court").
70. See, e.g., Sara K. Stadler, Forging a Truly Utilitarian Copyright, 91 Iowa L. Rev. 609, 616 n. 34 (2006) (acknowledging that the political labels of "liberal" and "conservative" have crept into the discourse of copyright, but also noting confusion as to their meaning);
71. Robert S. Boynton, The Tyranny of Copyright?, N. Y. Times Mag., Jan. 25, 2004, at 40, 42 (stating that the lawyers, scholars and activists forming Lawrence Lessig's "free culture movement" are neither "wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use of copyright" "[n]or do they share a coherent political ideology").
72. The studies by Beebe and Moore, discussed supra notes 30-32 and in the accompanying text, are notable exceptions.
73. Using a FOCUS search on LexisNexis, we searched for citing references to Supreme Court patent cases, using the search phrase: ["democrat" or "democratic" or "republican" or "conservative" or "liberal" or "biased" or "left-wing" or "right-wing"]. Most hits related to a secondary issue, for example, whether states can be subjected to private lawsuits. See, e.g., Fla. Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd. v. Coll. Sav. Bank, 527 U. S. 627 (1999). The IP aspects of decisions, however, were not discussed in political terms regardless of whether they were a "victory for consumers" by allowing gray market products
74. see, for example, Quality King Distributors, Inc. v. L'Anza Research International, Inc., 523 U. S. 135 (1998), or a "victory for makers of leading brand-name products."
75. See, e.g., Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Prods. Co., 514 U. S. 159 (1995). A search through the journals, in all cases, failed to turn up any discussion of political motivations behind Supreme Court decisions which is often found in other areas of the law.
76. Richards, supra note 34, at 403. It should be noted that the description of "boring" here is somewhat circular as it essentially boils down to not interesting.
77. See generally Mark A. Lemley, The Economics of Improvement in Intellectual Property Law, 75 Tex. L. Rev. 989 (1997) (discussing sequential innovation in copyright and patent law).
78. See, for example, the reaction to Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003), and discussion as to its effects on "morals" legislation, and the division this provoked in liberals versus conservatives.
79. Nelson Lund & John O. McGinnis, Lawrence v. Texas and Judicial Hubris, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 1555, 1595 (2004).
80. Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45, 56 (1905).
81. Spaeth, supra note 38;
82. see infra note 134 (giving a detailed description of the coding categories of liberal and conservative case outcomes employed in the Spaeth database).
83. See, e.g., Jack M. Balkin, Commentary, Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society, 79 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1, 6 (2004);
84. Margaret Chon, Intellectual Property "from Below": Copyright and Capability for Education, 40 U. C. Davis L. Rev. 803 (2007);
85. Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Distributive Values in Copyright, 83 Tex. L. Rev. 1535, 1540 (2005).
86. See, e.g., Wendy Gordon, A Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property, 102 Yale L. J. 1533, 1540 (1993);
87. Justin Hughes, The Philosophy of Intellectual Property, 77 Geo. L. J. 287, 288 (1988).
88. See Robert P. Merges & Jane C. Ginsburg, Foundations of Intellectual Property 21 (2004) (stating that the "'utilitarian' view of intellectual property is widely held to be the intellectual foundation for U. S. intellectual property law").
89. U. S. Const, amend. V.
90. U. S. Const, amend. XIV, § 1;
91. see also Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Mar. 20, 1952, 213 U. N. T. S. 262;
92. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 17, G. A. Res. 217 A (III), at 71, U. N. GAOR, 3d Sess., 1st. plen. mtg., U. N. Doc. A/810 (Dec. 12, 1948);
93. French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, art. XVII (Fr. 1789).
94. U. S. Const, art. I, § 8, cl. 8.
95. Id.
96. see Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U. S. 417, 429 (1984) ("The monopoly privileges that Congress may authorize are neither unlimited nor primarily designed to provide a special private benefit. Rather, the limited grant is a means by which an important public purpose may be achieved.");
97. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U. S. 151 (1975).
98. Justin Hughes, The Philosophy of Intellectual Property, 77 Geo. L. J. 287, 303-04 (1998) (noting that the Constitution's copyright and patent clause is cast in instrumental terms). The Constitution makes no specific provision for trademark or trade secret rights.
99. See Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U. S. 82 (1879). Congressional power with respect to trademarks is based on the Commerce Clause. U. S. Const, art. I, § 8, cl. 3.
100. See Dotan Oliar, Making Sense of the Intellectual Property Clause: Promotion of Progress as a Limitation on Congress's Intellectual Property Power, 94 Geo. L. J. 1771 (2006) (arguing that the Framers intended the preamble in the IP Clause, "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, " to serve as a limitation on congressional power).
101. But see Adam Mossoff, Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought About Patents? Reevaluating the Patent "Privilege" in Historical Context, 92 Cornell L. Rev. 953 (2007) (arguing that historically patent rights were defined and enforced in part as natural rights);
102. Thomas B. Nachbar, Intellectual Property and Constitutional Norms, 104 Colum. L. Rev. 272 (2004) (questioning historically derived understandings of the limits of the Intellectual Property Clause);
103. Thomas B. Nachbar, Constructing Copyright's Mythology, 6 Green Bag 2D 37, 46 (2002).
104. See Justin Hughes, Copyright and Incomplete Historiographies: Of Piracy, Propertization, and Thomas Jefferson, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 993 (2006);
105. see also Mossoff, supra note 60;
106. Alfred C. Yen, Restoring the Natural Law: Copyright as Labor and Possession, 51 Ohio St. L. J. 517 (1990).
107. See Christopher Sprigman, Reform (aliz) ing Copyright, 57 Stan. L. Rev. 485, 544 (2004).
108. This is not to suggest that there are not purely utilitarian conservatives.
109. Tertium quid is something that cannot be classified into either of two groups considered exhaustive: an intermediate thing or factor-a term artfully employed by Justice Scalia in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Bros., 529 U. S. 205, 215 (2000).
110. Robert P. Merges et al., Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age 2 (4th ed. 2006).
111. See Mark A. Lemley, Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding, 83 Tex. L. Rev. 1031 (2005). How recently is a matter of some debate. See Hughes, supra note 61.
112. See Robert Cooter & Thomas Ulen, Law and Economics 118 (4th ed. 2004).
113. See, e.g., Dan L. Burk & Mark A. Lemley, Policy Levers in Patent Law, 89 Va. L. Rev. 1575 (2003);
114. Joseph P. Liu, Regulatory Copyright, 83 N. C. L. Rev. 87 (2004). But note that bankruptcy and corporate law are just as recent and conspicuously engineered as IP, yet their appeal to conservatives is largely unquestioned.
115. See generally Lemley, supra note 66.
116. See, e.g., Kenneth W. Dam, Some Economic Considerations in the Intellectual Property Protection of Software, 24 J. Legal Stud. 321 (1995);
117. Frank H. Easterbrook, Intellectual Property is Still Property, 13 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 108, 112 (1990);
118. Edmund W. Kitch, Elementary and Persistent Errors in the Economic Analysis of Intellectual Property, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1727 (2000). For assessments of this claim
119. see Richard A. Epstein, Liberty Versus Property? Cracks in the Foundation of Copyright Law, 42 San Diego L. Rev. 1 (2005);
120. Wendy J. Gordon, An Inquiry Into the Merits of Copyright: The Challenges of Consistency, Consent, and Encouragement Theory, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 1343 (1989) (discussing similarities between copyright law and common law property);
121. Lemley, supra note 66 (reviewing the literature);
122. Henry E. Smith, Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information, 116 Yale L. J. 1742, 1744 (2007) (noting grave doubts about whether intellectual property is property).
123. See, e.g., Wendy J. Gordon, Copyright as Tort Law's Mirror Image: "Harms, " "Benefits, " and the Uses and Limits of Analogy, 34 McGeorge L. Rev. 533 (2003).
124. See, e.g., Tom W. Bell, Authors' Welfare: Copyright as a Statutory Mechanism for Redistributing Rights, 69 Brook. L. Rev. 229 (2003).
125. See, e.g., Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture 104, 194 (2004);
126. Shubha Ghosh, Patents and the Regulatory State: Rethinking the Patent Bargain Metaphor After Eldred, 19 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 1315 (2004);
127. Herbert Hovenkamp, Antitrust and the Regulatory Enterprise, 2004 Colum. Bus. L. Rev. 335, 336-37.
128. See, e.g., Lessig, supra note 73, at 249 ("When you focus the issue on lost creativity, people can see the copyright system makes no sense. As a good Republican might say, here government regulation is simply getting in the way of innovation and creativity. And as a good Democrat might say, here the government is blocking access and the spread of knowledge for no good reason. ").
129. Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, Pub. L. No. 105-298, §§ 102 (b)
130. (d), 112 Stat. 2827 (1998)
131. (codified as amended at 17 U. S. C. §§ 302, 304 (2006)).
132. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186, 196 (2003).
133. Id. at 258 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (arguing that the CTEA would "neither encourage creation nor benefit the long-dead author in any other important way");
134. Robert P. Merges, One Hundred Years of Solicitude: Intellectual Property Law, 1900-2000, 88 Calif. L. Rev. 2187, 2236 (2000) (describing the CTEA extension as 'virtually worthless' from an incentive perspective and "a classic instance of almost pure rent-seeking legislation").
135. Eldred, 537 U. S. at 251 -52 (Breyer, J., dissenting).
136. Id.
137. See generally Paul M. Schwartz & William Michael Treanor, Eldred and Lochner: Copyright Term Extension and Intellectual Property as Constitutional Property, 112 Yale L. J. 2331 (2003).
138. Indeed, Justices Stevens and Breyer, generally considered to be liberal justices, see infra Part III. B, were the dissenting justices in Eldred. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186, 222 (2003) (Stevens, J., dissenting);
139. id. at 242 (Breyer, J., dissenting).
140. United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549 (1995).
141. United States v. Morrison, 529 U. S. 598 (2000).
142. See generally Erwin Chemerinsky, The Rehnquist Revolution, 2 Pierce L. Rev. 1 (2004) (discussing the Rehnquist Court's limitations on the power of Congress under the Commerce Clause).
143. Matthew J. Sag, Beyond Abstraction: The Law and Economics of Copyright Scope and Doctrinal Efficiency, 81 Tul. L. Rev. 187, 192 (2006) (reviewing the economics of IP in the context of copyright).
144. See, e.g., Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006);
145. James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens (1996).
146. See, e.g., N. Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, 15 J. Libertarian Stud., Spring 2001, at 1, available at http://www.mises.org/ journals/jls/15-2/15-2-l.pdf;
147. Roderick T. Long, The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights, 3 Formulations (1995), available at http://libertariannation.Org/a/ f3111.html.
148. See, e.g., Patricia Aufderheide & Peter Jaszi, Ctr. for Soc. Media, Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers (2004), available at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/ files/pdf/UNTOLDSTORIES-Report.pdf;
149. Marjorie Heins & Tricia Beckles, Brennan Ctr. for Justice, Will Fair Use Survive? (2005), available at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/ WillFairUseSurvive.pdf;
150. Rochelle Dreyfuss, Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as Language in the Pepsi Generation, 65 Notre Dame L. Rev. 397 (1990);
151. Alex Kozinski, Essay, Trademarks Unplugged, 68 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 960, 972 (1993).
152. Lessig, supra note 73, at 95.
153. See Jessica Litman, Breakfast with Batman: The Public Interest in the Advertising Age, 108 Yale L. J. 1717 (1999).
154. See Stacey L. Dogan & Mark A. Lemley, The Merchandising Right: Fragile Theory or Fait Accompli?, 54 Emory L. J. 461 (2005).
155. See James Gibson, Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law, 116 Yale L. J. 882 (2007) (discussing a number of examples).
156. E.g., Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15 (1971) (finding that "Fuck the Draft" printed on the appellant's jacket was not repugnant to constitutional speech protections).
157. E.g., N. Y. Times Co. v. United States, 403 U. S. 713 (1971) (holding that the government did not meet its burden of showing justification for the imposition of a prior restraint of expression in relation to the publication of the Pentagon Papers).
158. Alex Kozinski & Christopher Newman, What's So Fair About Fair Use?, 46 J. Copyright Soc'y 513, 516-17 (1999).
159. See supra Part I. B.
160. See Nine Justices, Ten Years: A Statistical Retrospective, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 510, 520 tbl. IV (2004). On average, 35.5% of Supreme Court decisions in the 1994 to 2003 terms were unanimous. The proportion of unanimous cases was as low as 29.6% in 1998 and as high as 43% in 1997.
161. Id.
162. This calculation is derived from our database of Supreme Court IP cases described in detail infra Part III. A.
163. See, e.g., KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007);
164. eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L. L. C., 547 U. S. 388 (2006);
165. Ill. Tool Works Inc. v. Indep. Ink, Inc., 547 U. S. 28 (2006);
166. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U. S. 913 (2005);
167. Merck K GaA v. Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd., 545 U. S. 193 (2005);
168. K. P Permanent Make-Up, Inc. v. Lasting Impression I, Inc., 543 U. S. 111 (2004);
169. Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U. S. 23 (2003);
170. Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc., 537 U. S. 418 (2003);
171. Holmes Group, Inc. v. Vornado Air Circulation Sys., Inc., 535 U. S. 826 (2002);
172. Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., 535 U. S. 722 (2002);
173. Traffix Devices, Inc. v. Mktg. Displays, Inc., 532 U. S. 23 (2001);
174. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Bros., 529 U. S. 205 (2000);
175. Quality King Distribs., Inc. v. L'Anza Research Int'l, Inc., 523 U. S. 135 (1998);
176. Feltner v. Columbia Pictures Television, Inc., 523 U. S. 340 (1998);
177. Pfaff v. Wells Elecs., Inc., 525 U. S. 55 (1998);
178. Warner-Jenkinson Co., Inc. v. Hilton Davis Chem. Co., 520 U. S. 17 (1997).
179. See, e.g., Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., 127 S. Ct. 1746 (2007);
180. Medlmmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U. S. 118 (2007);
181. Unitherm Food Sys., Inc. v. Swift-Eckrich, Inc., 546 U. S. 394 (2006);
182. Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186 (2003);
183. J. E. M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi- Bred Int'l, Inc., 534 U. S. 124 (2001);
184. N. Y. Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U. S. 483 (2001);
185. Fla. Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd. v. Coll. Sav. Bank, 527 U. S. 627 (1999);
186. Dickinson v. Zurko, 527 U. S. 150 (1999).
187. Simensky, supra note 43, at 116 (citing Kenneth Starr's approbation of the professionalism of the Court).
188. Michael J. Gerhardt, Attitudes About Attitudes, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 1733, 1743 (2003) (footnote omitted) (reviewing The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited by Jeffrey A. Segal & Harold J. Spaeth).
189. Justice Ginsburg has only twice voted against the IP owner in a non-unanimous Supreme Court decision. See Medlmmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U. S. 118 (2007);
190. Unitherm Food Sys., Inc. v. Swift-Eckrich, Inc., 546 U. S. 394 (2006);
191. see also Lawrence Lessig, How I Lost the Big One, Legal Aff., Mar.-Apr. 2004, available at http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=544.
192. See, e.g., Fla. Prepaid, 527 U. S. 627;
193. Eli Lilly & Co. v. Medtronic, Inc., 496 U. S. 661 (1990);
194. Stewart v. Abend, 495 U. S. 207 (1990);
195. Dow Chem. Co. v. United States, 476 U. S. 227 (1986);
196. Dowling v. United States, 473 U. S. 207 (1985);
197. Mills Music, Inc. v. Snyder, 469 U. S. 153 (1985);
198. Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co., 467 U. S. 986 (1984);
199. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U. S. 151 (1975);
200. Teleprompter Corp. v. Columbia Broad. Sys., Inc., 415 U. S. 394 (1974).
201. See, e.g., Unitherm Food Sys., Inc. v. Swift-Eckrich, Inc. 546 U. S. 394 (2006);
202. Fla. Prepaid, 527 U. S. 627;
203. S. F. Arts & Athletics, Inc. v. U. S. Olympic Comm., 483 U. S. 522 (1987);
204. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U. S. 539 (1985).
205. Andrew D. Martin & Kevin M. Quinn, Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U. S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999, 10 Pol. Analysis 134-53 (2002). Updated data is available at http://mqscores.wustl.edu/ measures.php. The figure shows the average Martin-Quinn score for each justice during the period 1994-2004. We discuss the Martin- Quinn scores in detail below. See infra notes 151-159 and accompanying text.
206. Data: Martin & Quinn, supra note 106.
207. The average Martin-Quinn scores for each justice between 1994 and 2004 were: Stevens (-2.94); Ginsburg (-1.43); Souter (-1.17); Breyer (-1.05); O'Connor (0.51); Kennedy (0.72); Rehnquist (1.45); Scalia (2.95); and Thomas (3.38).
208. Edelman, Klein, and Lindquist refer to this as "disordered voting." See Edelman et al., supra note 33.
209. For detailed correlations, see infra Table 2 in Part III. B. Florida Prepaid is the only case in which Ginsburg cast her vote in a different direction to that of Rehnquist. See Fla. Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd. v. Coll. Sav. Bank, 527 U. S. 627 (1999).
210. In the IP database, the correlation between Ginsburg and Stevens is 0.51, the correlation between Ginsburg and Breyer is 0.58.
211. See Tonja Jacobi, Competing Models of Judicial Coalition Formation and Case Outcome Determination, 2 J. Legal Analysis (forthcoming 2009), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=947592.
212. See id.
213. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U. S. 913, 923-25 (2005).
214. The concurring opinion of Justice Ginsburg (joined by Justices Rehnquist and Kennedy) would have substantially narrowed the application of the Sony doctrine by adopting a ratio test in relation to substantial non-infringing use. Id. at 942 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). In contrast, the concurring opinion of Breyer (joined by Stevens and O'Connor) expressly rejected the application of a ratio test in relation to substantial non-infringing use.
215. Id. at 949 (Breyer, J., concurring).
216. Id. at 923 (holding that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties).
217. eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L. L. C., 547 U. S. 388, 391 (2006) (holding that the usual equitable principles apply with equal force to disputes arising under the Patent Act).
218. Id. at 395 (Roberts, C. J., concurring).
219. Id. at 396 (Kennedy, J., concurring). The Court's decision in Grokster illustrates a similar division beneath the edifice of unanimity. In that case, Ginsburg's concurring opinion (joined by Rehnquist and Kennedy) takes a high-protectionist view; whereas Breyer's concurring opinion (joined by Stevens and O'Connor) adopts a low protectionist stance. Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U. S.
220. U. S. U. S. 913, 942 (2005) (Ginsberg, J., concurring);
221. id. at 949 (Breyer, J., concurring).
222. Segal & Spaeth, The Attitudinal Model, supra note 3, at 32.
223. Segal & Spaeth, The Attitudlnal Model Revisited, supra note 9, at 319 (finding that ideology correctly predicts 77% of justices' votes in search and seizure cases from 1962 to 1998, this constitutes a 30% improvement on the null hypothesis that ideology does not explain case outcomes);
224. Jeffrey A. Segal & Albert D. Cover, Ideological Values and the Votes of U. S. Supreme Court Justices, 83 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 557, 561 (1989) (finding that ideology explains 80% of justices' votes in civil liberties cases between 1953 and 1988).
225. See Lee Ross, The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process, in 10 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 173 (Leonard Berkowitz ed., 1977).
226. See Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability, 5 Cognitive Psychol. 207 (1973).
227. 447 U. S. 303 (1980).
228. 450 U. S. 175 (1981).
229. We discuss the Martin-Quinn scores in more detail infra Part III. A.
230. Diehr, 450 U. S. 175. Chakrabarty held that a live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter under section 101 of the Patent Act. See Chakrabarty, 447 U. S. 303. Note that in both these cases the conservative justices chose to expand property rights through an expansive non-textualist reading of the Patent Act. We are grateful to Adam Mossoff for this insight.
231. Data: Martin & Quinn, supra note 106.
232. The Appendix lists the cases contained in our final dataset. See supra app.
233. The general database is available at the Judicial Research Initiative website, http://www.cas.sc.edu/poli/juri/sctdata.htm. For an assessment of the use of this database, see Lee Epstein & Gary King, The Rules of Inference, 69 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1, 23 (2002). For other studies using this database
234. see Ruth Colker & Kevin M. Scott, Essay, Dissing States?: Invalidation of State Action During the Rehnquist Era, 88 Va. L. Rev. 1301, 1305 (2002);
235. Frank B. Cross & Blake J. Nelson, Strategic Institutional Effects on Supreme Court Decisionmaking, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1437, 1483 (2001);
236. Lee Epstein et al., The Supreme Court During Crisis: How War Affects Only Non-War Cases, 80 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1 (2005);
237. Epstein & Segal supra note 10;
238. Youngsik Lim, An Empirical Analysis of Supreme Court Justices' Decision-making, 29 J. Legal Stud. 721 (2000).
239. Although the general database contains subject matter codes relating to some areas of IP-patent (661), copyright (662), trademark (663), and patentability of computer processes (664) -we found the subject matter coding in the general database to be under-inclusive. For example, Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., 517 U. S. 517 U. S. U. S. 370 (1996) is coded as "jury trial" rather than patent and thus falls under the general issue heading of criminal procedure rather than economic activity.
240. See Carolyn Shapiro, Coding Complexity: Bringing Law to the Empirical Analysis of the Supreme Court, 60 Hastings L. J. 477 (2009).
241. We searched Lexis Nexis for U. S. Supreme Court Cases as follows: core-terms (copyright) or core-terms (patent) or core-terms (trademark) or core-terms (trade secret) or coreterms (fair use) and date (geq (01/01/1953) and leq (05/30/2006)). We excluded non-IP cases, grants of certiorari, and cases dealing solely with the recovery of attorney fees. Note that our coreterms did not include the right of publicity and thus our database does not include Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co., 433 U. S. 433 U. S. U. S. 562 (1977) (holding that the First Amendment did not immunize a TV broadcasting company against publicity rights claims by a performer). The Appendix lists the cases contained in our final dataset.
242. See, e.g., Ill. Tool Works Inc. v. Indep. Ink, Inc., 547 U. S. 28, 31 (2006) (holding that the mere fact that a tying product is patented does not support a presumption of market power). There are eight patent/antirust cases, two copyright/antitrust cases, and two trademark/antitrust cases.
243. In addition, outcomes favoring affirmative action and reproductive freedom are also coded as liberal. Pro-union decisions are coded as liberal except in the context of antitrust cases, where a pro-union decision is regarded as conservative. In cases pertaining to economic activity, liberal outcomes include pro-competition, anti-business, pro-indigent, pro-small business vis-à-vis large business, pro-debtor, pro-bankrupt, pro-Indian, pro-environmental protection, pro-consumer, and pro-economic underdog. See generally Spaeth, supra note 38.
244. Spaeth uses the term "liberal." See id. However, to avoid confusion resulting from multiple uses of "liberal"-applied to cases and justices-we use the term "Underdog."
245. Although IP cases often involve parties who are both owners of distinct IP rights, only two of the cases in the IP dataset required the Court to choose between directly conflicting claims of IP protection. See N. Y. Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U. S. 483 (2001);
246. Cmty. for Creative Nonviolence v. Reid, 490 U. S. 730 (1989). In all other cases, the issue before the Court clearly determined which party was the IP owner in the relevant sense of asserting a claimed IP right. The Tasini case centered around a conflict between the copyright claims of freelance journalists under section 106 (1) of the Copyright Act and the scope of the reproduction and distribution privilege accorded to collective work copyright owners, such as the New York Times, by section 201 (c). In Tasini we coded the freelance journalists as the IP owners because they were the original authors of the works in question. The issue in the CCNV case was whether the sculptor or the party that commissioned him to make the work of art was the copyright owner under the work made for hire doctrine. In CCNV we coded the artist as the IP owner because he was the original author of the work in question.
247. See Spaeth, supra note 38.
248. For a qualitative study of Supreme Court IP cases between 1975 and 2005, see Pamela Samuelson, The Generativity of Sony v. Universal: The Intellectual Property Legacy of Justice Stevens, 74 Fordham L. Rev. 1831 (2006) (reviewing trends in IP law during Justice Stevens' tenure on the Supreme Court).
249. See Epstein & King, supra note 130, at 82-97 (discussing the importance of reliability and validity in data collection and measurement).
250. See supra Part II. B.1.
251. To the extent that the errors are unbiased, this conservative assessment of the differences between the justices allows us to be more confident of the significance of any alternative result we find.
252. A control variable is a variable that is held constant in order to analyze the relationship between other variables without interference.
253. See Louis Kaplow, The Patent-Antitrust Intersection: A Reappraisal, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 1813, 1817 (1984).
254. See generally Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, The Federal Circuit: A Case Study in Specialized Courts, 64 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1 (1989).
255. See generally Glynn S. Lunney, Jr., Patent Law, the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court: A Quiet Revolution, 11 Sup. Ct. Econ. Rev. 1 (2004).
256. Chris Guthrie & Tracey E. George, The Futility of Appeal: Disciplinary Insights into the "Affirmance Effect" on the United States Courts of Appeals, 32 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 357, 358 (noting that "over the last decade, the Supreme Court reversed 64% of the cases it heard").
257. See, e.g., Cross & Tiller, supra note 20;
258. Revesz, supra note 3.
259. See Epstein & King, supra note 130, at 88-89 (noting that on Segal's measure of presidential economic liberalism, for example, Jimmy Carter is ideologically closer to Richard Nixon than to Lyndon Johnson).
260. See Tonja Jacobi, The Senatorial Courtesy Game: Explaining the Norm of Informal Vetoes in Advice and Consent Nominations, 30 Legis. Stud. Q. 193 (2005).
261. See supra fig. 1.
262. Martin & Quinn, supra note 106.
263. For a discussion of other measures, see Epstein & King, supra note 130, at 95;
264. see also Barry Friedman & Anna L. Harvey, Electing the Supreme Court, 78 Ind. L. J. 123, 134-37 (2003).
265. See Martin & Quinn, supra note 106. Item response theory models are mathematical functions used to estimate the probability of underlying characteristics or latent traits of the subject of interest, given a set of observed outcomes.
266. A justice's ideal point is his or her most preferred policy position, such that any change in outcome away from that position reduces that individual's utility.
267. See Lee Epstein et al., Ideological Drift among Supreme Court Justices: Who, When, and How Important?, 101 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1483 (2007).
268. In 2004 Justice O'Connor held the median position with a Martin-Quinn score of 0.08; with her retirement and the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Kennedy occupies the median position with a Martin-Quinn score of 0.49. Media portraits of Justice Kennedy as the new "swing vote" on the Court fit very well with Martin and Quinn's analysis
269. See, e.g., Robert Barnes, In Second Term, Roberts Court Defines Itself, Wash. Post, June 25, 2007, at A3;
270. Robert Barnes, Justice Kennedy: The Highly Influential Man in the Middle, Wash. Post, May 13, 2007, at A1.
271. Andrew D. Martin & Kevin M. Quinn, Can Ideal Point Estimate be Used as Explanatory Variables? (Martin-Quinn Scores, Working Paper 2005), available at http://mqscores.wustl.edu/media/resnote.pdf.
272. We are indebted to Andrew Martin for creating this unique data for us.
273. Famsworth has recently commented on what he perceives to be a limitation of the Martin-Quinn scores: the notion that judicial policy preferences can be arrayed along a single ideological spectrum. Famsworth argues that the Martin-Quinn Scores assume rather than prove the attitudinal model. See Ward Famsworth, The Use and Limits of Martin-Quinn Scores to Assess Supreme Court Justices, with Special A ttention to the Problem of Ideological Drift, 101 Nw. U. L. Rev. Colloquy 143 (2007), available at http://www.law.northwestem.edu/ lawreview/colloquy/2007/11/. In fact, although Martin and Quinn assume that a single dimension is operative in Supreme Court decision-making, as discussed they make no assumption that the dimension is necessarily ideological. The chances are vanishingly small that the model used by Martin and Quinn could be made to work if their assumption of a single dimension was seriously flawed.
274. Data: Harold J. Spaeth, United States Supreme Court Judicial Database, http://www.cas.sc.edu/poli/juri/sctdata.htm. All correlations in the general database are significant at the 0.01 level. All correlations in the IP database are significant at the 0.01 level, except: Rehnquist-Breyer, Kennedy-Breyer and Stevens-Kennedy, each significant at the 0.05 level; and Thomas-O'Connor and Thomas-Scalia, for which there is perfect collinearity.
275. * Difference between correlations is significant at the 0.05 level.
276. ** Difference between correlations is significant at the 0.01 level. At the 0.05 level we can have 95% confidence that the results are not the product of a random effect. At the 0.01 significance level, the confidence is 99%.
277. # Approximated p-values, where the correlation in IP database is assumed 0.999 and not 1.000. The correlation comparison formula is based on the conversion of correlations into Fisher z-scores, which are undefined for p= 1.000.
278. See supra Part II. A. 1.
279. See supra Part I. B.
280. See supra Part I. A.
281. See supra Part I. B.
282. See.supra Part I. B. 4.
283. Logit and probit are both designed for estimation of binary outcomes; they vary with respect to the assumptions made about the distribution of the error term. Whereas logit assumes a logistic distribution, probit assumes a normal distribution.
284. The reason for this is that a logit coefficient represents a movement along a non-linear scale; consequently the effect of a one-unit change in the independent variable will depend on the point at which the change occurs. Lee Epstein et al., On the Effective Communication of the Results of Empirical Studies, Part I, 59 Vand. L. Rev. 5811, 1813 (2006).
285. We do so by adjusting the standard errors given the heteroskedastic and clustered structure of the data. That is, these are mechanisms of accounting for the possible lack of independence between cases and over time. We undertake three variations of estimation, with Huber-White standard errors, with standard errors clustered by judges and clustered by cases. See Peter J. Huber, The Behavior of Maximum Likelihood Estimates Under Nonstandard Conditions, in Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability 221 (1967), available at http://projecteuclid.0rg/DPubS/Repository/ l.0/Disseminate?view=body&id=pdf-l&handle=euclid.bsmsp/1200512988;
286. William. Rogers, sgl7:
287. Regression Standard Errors in Clustered Samples, 13 Stata Technical Bull. 19 (1983);
288. Halbert White, A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity, 48 Econometrica 817 (1980). William Roger's robust estimator of the covariance matrix of the estimates may be considered an extension of Peter Huber's earlier formula. Clustering helps mitigate the underestimation of standard errors-a typical hazard in panel data-and reduces the risk of rejecting a true null. For similar approaches
289. see, for example, Julie Agnew et al., Portfolio Choice and Trading in a Large 401 (k) Plan, 93 Am. Econ. Rev. 193 (2003);
290. John Core & Wayne Guay, Stock-Option Plans for Non-Executive Employees, 61 J. Fin. Econ. 253 (2001). The most effective way to factor our judge- and case-level heterogeneity entirely would be to use fixed-effects estimation. In our data, however, using fixed-effects is not possible as it may lead to systematic selection, since all observations related to cases with unanimous decisions and to judges who voted strictly in one direction would be dropped. More important, given the dramatic reduction in the number of observations and small group sizes, fixed-effects would pose an incidental parameter problem, or the hazard of inconsistent estimates resulting from a small number of cases used to estimate a large number of parameters.
291. See, e.g., i. Neyman & Elizabeth L. Scott, Consistent Estimates Based on Partially Consistent Observations, 16 Econometrica 1 (1948);
292. Tony Lancaster, The Incidental Parameters Problem Since 1948, 95 J. Econometrics 391 (2000). Most results are substantively similar using all three variations of estimation, so we report Huber-White standard errors except where otherwise specified.
293. These are the Martin-Quinn scores for Justice Douglas in the 1974 term and Justice Rehnquist in the 1975 term.
294. It is important to remember that these figures describe changes in conditional probabilities, not absolute probabilities. For example, a 79% reduction in the odds of voting PRO- IP would move an outcome from 80% to 17% (= 80 - 79% of 80), not from 80% to 1%.
295. Based on the tenure average Martin-Quinn scores for each justice.
296. See supra Part III. D.2 (reporting a coefficient of 0.14). In Model 1 the logit coefficient was 0.13 with a standard error of 0.04; in Model 2 the logit coefficient was 0.12 with a standard error of 0.06.
297. Again, this result holds across all model specifications.
298. Here we are simply using the Underdog variable to control for the direction of the lower court decision. The figure does not look materially different without this control.
299. Compare, for example, the broad scope of the fair use doctrine in copyright law with the narrow scope of the experimental use defense in patent law. See Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186, 219-20 (2003).
300. This is consistent with some attitudinal literature. For example, Segal & Spaeth's analysis of Supreme Court search and seizure decisions from 1962 to 1998 shows that although overall the Court voted in a liberal direction in 36% of cases, factors such as the location of the search, the timing of the search and the presence or absence of a warrant affected that result considerably. See Segal & Spaeth, supra note 9, at 316-20.
301. For a description of these control variables, see supra Part III. A.2.
302. See, e.g., KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007);
303. eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L. L. C., 547 U. S. 388 (2006);
304. Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabuskihilo Co., 535 U. S. 722 (2002).
305. For a thorough discussion of complex regression models, see Jack Johnston & John DiNardo, Econometric Methods (4th ed. 1997). For an application of a spline regression
306. see Ranjay Gulati & Maxim Sytch, Dependence Asymmetry and Joint Dependence in Interorganizational Relationships: Effects of Embeddedness on a Manufacturer's Performance in Procurement Relationships, 52 Admin. Sci. Q. 32 (2007).
307. A spline allows the regression to have two separate slopes-one liberal, one conservative-without confuting any given justice to the category of liberal or conservative. This maintains the maximum amount of data. We use simultaneous estimation on the logit equations for each spline and a joint variance-covariance matrix to account for possible correlation among structural errors.
308. More technically, the conservative spline was recoded to equal the Martin-Quinn score if the justice's score was greater than or equal to zero, and was set to zero if otherwise. Likewise, the liberal spline was set equal to the Martin-Quinn score only if the justice's score was below zero, and constrained to zero otherwise.
309. See Martin & Quinn, supra note 106.
310. The coefficient was 0.19 in the direction predicted. The effect is significant at the 0.05 level using robust standard errors and robust standard errors clustered by case. However, the effect is only marginally significant when clustering by judge, where p = 0.07.
311. A dummy variable is a simple 1/0 coding of whether a given data point fits in a given category. Here, any case concerning IP is coded IP=1, all other cases are coded IP=0.
312. Bendix Autolite Corp. v. Midwesco Enters., Inc., 486 U. S. 888, 897 (1988) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).
313. The difference is statistically significant at the 0.05 level.
314. Note that although our analysis in Part III. D.5 only found a statistically significant effect for conservatives, our general findings apply to both ends of the ideological spectrum.
315. Responding to our study in this Article, Barton Beebe has subsequently tested the effect of ideology in copyright cases dealing with the fair use doctrine. Beebe's preliminary results produced a null result. See Barton Beebe, Does Judicial Ideology Affect Copyright Fair Use Outcomes?: Evidence From the Fair Use Case Law, 31 Colum. J. L. & Arts 517 (2008).
316. See. e.g., Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., 127 S. Ct. 1746 (2007);
317. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007);
318. Medlmmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U. S. 118 (2007);
319. eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L. L. C., 547 U. S. 388 (2006);
320. Ill. Tool Works Inc. v. Indep. Ink, Inc., 547 U. S. 28 (2006);
321. Unitherm Food Sys., Inc. v. Swift-Eckrich, Inc., 546 U. S. 394 (2006);
322. Merck KGaA v. Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd., 545 U. S. 193 (2005);
323. Holmes Group, Inc. v. Vornado Air Circulation Sys., Inc., 535 U. S. 826 (2002);
324. Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., 535 U. S. 722 (2002).
325. The 2006-2007 term was the most significant term for patent law in the Supreme Court since the 1965-1966 term.
326. Matthew Sag & Kurt Rohde, Patent Reform and Differential Impact, 8 Minn. J. L. Sci. & Tech. 1 (2007).
327. See, e.g., Joshua B. Fischman, Decision-Making Under a Norm of Consensus: A Structural Analysis of Three-Judge Panels (1st Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Paper, Working Paper, 2008), available at http://ssm.com/ abstract=912299. The party of the appointing president is unlikely to be a useful measure of ideology in Federal Circuit decisions because Republican-appointed judges accounted for 92.3% of opinions in their sample.
328. See Allison & Lemley, supra note 7.
329. See, e.g., Patricia Cohen, A Split Emerges As Conservatives Discuss Darwin, N. Y. Times, May 5, 2007, at A1.
330. United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549 (1995);
331. Lessig, supra note 103.
332. Lessig, supra note 103;
333. see also Lopez, 514 U. S. 549.
334. See Staudt et al., supra note 24. Note that this study also uses Martin-Quinn scores as a measure of ideology.
335. See id.
336. The 2005-2006 Martin-Quinn scores for Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito are 1.38 and 1.41 respectively. The 2004-2005 Martin-Quinn scores for former chief justice Rehnquist and former justice O'Connor are 1.41 and 0.08, respectively.