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To Stay or Not to Stay: Patent Litigation in the Federal District Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Banks Miller  and
Brett Curry
Banks Miller
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Brett Curry*
Affiliation:
Georgia Southern University, USA
*
Contact the corresponding author, Brett Curry, at bcurry@georgiasouthern.edu.
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Abstract

We investigate when district judges stay litigation pending the resolution of parallel administrative proceedings. Leveraging unique aspects of patent litigation to create a robust test of the proposition, we consider how ideology conditions judicial behavior on this procedural judgment. We find that legal considerations guide stay decisions and that there is also an ideological dimension to that choice. Conservative district judges approach motions to stay consistent with conservative concerns regarding frivolous litigation even as they are influenced by case characteristics. This suggests a role for judicial discretion and implies that ideology’s influence in the district courts may be greater than frequently thought.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 167 - 188
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/LCULHG.

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