Gender disparity in scholarly influence-measured in terms of differential citation to academic work-has been widely documented. The weight of the evidence is that, in many fields of academic inquiry, papers authored by women receive fewer citations than papers authored by men. To investigate whether a similar gender disparity in scholarly influence exists in legal studies, we analyze the impact of gender on citation to articles published in top 100 law reviews between 1990 and 2010. We find evidence of gender disparity in citation rates, but in surprising contrast to observations made in other disciplines, we observe that articles authored by women receive significantly more citations than articles authored by men. * Professor of Law and Austin Owen Research Fellow, University of Richmond. Thanks to Jim Gibson and Shari Motro for comments on an earlier draft of this Article.
As an appellate body jurisdictionally demarcated by subject matter rather than geography, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit occupies a unique role in the federal judiciary. This controversial institutional design has profoundly affected the jurisprudential development of legal regimes within its purview-especially in patent law, which the Federal Circuit has come to thoroughly dominate in its two decades of existence. In this Article, we assess the court's performance against its basic premise: that, compared to prior regional circuit involvement, centralization of legal authority in the Federal Circuit will yield a clearer, more coherent, and more predictable legal infrastructure for patent law. Using empirical data obtained from a novel study of the Federal Circuit's jurisprudence of claim construction-the interpretation of language defining a patent's scope-we conclude that, on this indicator at least, the result has been decidedly mixed, although there are some encouraging signs. Specifically, the study indicates that the Federal Circuit is sharply divided between two basic methodological approaches to claim construction, each of which leads to distinct results. The dominant analytic framework gained additional favor during the period of the study, and yet the court became increasingly polarized. We also find that the significantly different approaches to claim construction followed by individual Federal Circuit judges has led to panel dependency; claim construction analysis is clearly affected by the composition of the three-judge panel that hears and decides the case. While little in the results of this study would lead one to conclude that the court has been an unqualified success, we believe that the picture of the Federal Circuit that emerges is of a court in broad transition. Driven in part by new appointments and an effort to respond to its special mandate, a new Federal Circuit
A response toPervasive sequence patents cover the entire human genome by J Rosenfeld and C Mason. Genome Med 2013, 5:27.See related Correspondence by Rosenfeld and Mason, http://genomemedicine.com/content/5/3/27 and related letter by Rosenfeld and Mason, http://genomemedicine.com/content/6/2/15
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