Boston University School of Law Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law Faculty Scholarship 6-2012 Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction Paul Gugliuzza Boston University School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Courts Commons, and the Intellectual Property Law Commons Recommended Citation Paul Gugliuzza, Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction, 100 Georgetown Law Journal 1437 (2012). Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/168 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ARTICLES Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction PAUL R. GUGLIUZZA* Thirty years ago, Congress created the Federal Circuit for the overriding purpose of bringing uniformity to patent law. Yet less than half of the court’s cases are patent cases. Most Federal Circuit cases involve veterans benefits, government-employment actions, government contracts, and other matters. Al- though existing literature purports to study the Federal Circuit as an institution, these projects focus largely on the court’s patent cases. This Article, by contrast, considers whether the court’s nonpatent docket might affect the development of patent law and whether the court’s specialization in patent law has conse- quences for how it decides nonpatent cases. These inquiries result in two primary contributions. First, drawing on institu- tional-choice theory, this Article suggests that certain litigants—particularly military veterans but also government employees and government contractors— should not be forced to litigate appeals in a specialized court in Washington, D.C.