While Jason Rantanen's (Iowa) third update to The Federal Circuit Dataset Project will certainly interest empirical IP scholars, the Project's broader implications speak to empirical law scholars in all fields.
The third edition advances the existing Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions in at least two main ways. First, the dataset now includes document numbers for all archived documents. Second, the dataset now facilitates increased understanding about what happens to appeals, including information about appeal pendency and origin.
Setting aside the dataset's utility to empirical IP scholars, the Project itself reflects a growing commitment to the hard and often under-rewarded work of dataset creation as well as an impulse to make such data (and related codebooks, etc.) publicly-available. Such impulses need to be rewarded, promoted, and nurtured. The paper's abstract follows.
"This paper introduces the third generation of the Federal Circuit Dataset Project. The third generation builds on the existing Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions with the following enhancements:
- The addition of a dataset of all dockets for the Federal Circuit since 2000. These dockets are linked to the documents in the Compendium through the Appeal_Dockets field in both datasets.
- New fields containing additional information about Federal Circuit decisions.
- More complete data in existing fields that require manual coding.
- Parallel archiving of the document and docket datasets on the Dataverse.
In addition to describing the third generation of the Federal Circuit Dataset Project, this paper also provides updated descriptive statistics about Federal Circuit decisions and new statistics on appeal dockets."
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