Good appellate practice means explaining decisions: how the overuse of one-word affirmances harms US patent law

Charles Macedo, David Goldberg, Thomas Hart, John Dellaportas and Jamie Zipper

Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice, 2025, vol. 20, issue 3, 166-169

Abstract: The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issues one-word decisions under Local Rule 36 in roughly one-third of the patent appeals it hears.Although US law allows for one-word decisions, they should be rare because parties, reviewing courts and the public need transparency in decisions; explaining decisions promotes accuracy and quality in decision-making and helps prevent inconsistent legal outcomes.The Federal Circuit issues many more one-word affirmances than other US Courts of Appeals, which disparately affects patent law, and needs to be addressed to avoid increasing unclarity in the law.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jiplp/jpae094 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jiplap:v:20:y:2025:i:3:p:166-169.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice is currently edited by Eleonora Rosati, Stefano Barazza and Marius Schneider

More articles in Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().