Matthew Sag, Tonja Jacobi, and Maxim Sytch have written, "The Effect of Judicial Ideology in Intellectual Property Cases" (2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=997963.
The paper
investigates the relationship between ideology and judicial decision-making in
the context of intellectual property. Is the traditional ideological
divide between “liberals” and “conservatives” of little or no relevance in specialized fields like IP? Does law relating to patents, copyrights, trade marks and trade secrets have any consistent or predictable ideological component?
Using data drawn from Supreme Court
intellectual property cases decided in between 1954 and 2006, the paper
argues that judicial decision making in relation to IP is
significantly and predictably shaped by judicial ideology. They find that the
more conservative a Justice is, the more likely it is that she or he will vote
for the IP owner in any given case. Beyond the conclusions themselves, readers might be interested in their use of the
“Martin-Quinn” scores as a measure of judicial ideology.
Comments