Author ORCID Identifier

Paul Gugliuzza 0000-0002-4018-3222

Jonathan Nash 0000-0001-5816-6896

Jason Rantanen 0000-0002-3949-6176

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Keywords

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Dissent, Separate opinions, Federal Circuit Database Project, Ideology, Judges, Pauline Newman, Judicial behavior

Abstract

Part I sketches a theory of dissent, explaining how voting and opinion-writing behavior on a multi-member court, such as a federal court of appeals, is a function of both a judge's preferences, as well as costs, including the relational disruption that comes from disagreeing with colleagues.

Part II provides background on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as well as a survey of prior studies of decision-making on the court and explanations of those studies' limitations.

Part III describes our methodology, including the novel dataset we built for the purpose of this study.

Part IV conducts a deep dive into separate opinion writing behavior on the Federal Circuit, confirming and rejecting various hypotheses about how the semi-specialized nature of the Federal Circuit dictates the court's decision-making and its judges' opinion writing.

Part V then focuses more specifically on dissenting opinions, testing whether political ideology or prior experience in a field is a meaningful predictor of voting behavior.

Part VI provides a brief foray into the role of collegiality. Because the Federal Circuit's judges are all located in a single courthouse, we might see interpersonal relationships play a more important role than on the regional circuits-including in the controversial case of Judge Pauline Newman.

Part VII concludes by engaging other recent studies on judicial ideology in patent cases and sketching a preliminary theory of ideology on a (relatively) apolitical court.

First Page

877

Publication Title

American University Law Review

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