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Ordinarily, in federal court, only case-ending judgments can be appealed. The writ of mandamus is one exception to that so-called final judgment rule. Mandamus permits a litigant who is dissatisfied with a lower court ruling to obtain immediate reversal if, among other things, the ruling was indisputably wrong and the party seeking mandamus has no other way to get relief. This exacting standard stems from mandamus’s origin as one of the common law’s “extraordinary” writs. Federal courts of appeals typically issue mandamus once or twice per year at most. In patent cases, however, mandamus is a remarkably ordinary form of appellate relief. As the empirical study presented by this article shows, in the past thirteen years, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals nationwide, has issued mandamus sixty-one times, granting 22% of the mandamus petitions it has received in cases pending in the federal district courts (61 of 283). Crucially, the Federal Circuit’s high grant rate is driven almost entirely by mandamus petitions in cases from two judicial districts, the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas, on a single legal issue, transfer of venue. On transfer-related petitions arising from those courts, the Federal Circuit has granted the extraordinary writ of mandamus an astonishing 37.3% of the time (in 38 of 102 cases) since 2008. And this after having never granted a transfer-related mandamus petition before that year. The Federal Circuit, with its semi-specialized jurisdiction over patent cases and a few other areas, is often criticized for taking an “exceptionalist” approach to procedural issues in patent litigation. It is tempting to lob that critique at the Federal Circuit’s aberrant mandamus practice, too. We argue, however, that the court’s high grant rate actually stems from systematic flaws in the patent litigation system that the Federal Circuit has little power to fix—namely, rules of venue and judicial case assignment that encourage plaintiffs to shop not just for favorable district courts, but for individual district judges. Addressing the underlying problem of judge shopping—as the Western District of Texas has finally begun to do—would likely help bring the Federal Circuit’s mandamus practice into the mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an original data set of around 70,000 civil rights cases heard by nearly 200 judges, we study the effect of presidential appointments to federal district courts. We provide the first causal estimates of whether lawsuits end differently depending on their assignment to either a Democratic or a Republican appointed judge. We show Republican appointees cause fewer settlements and more dismissals, favoring defendants by around 5 percentage points. We estimate a similarly sized effect for a sample of civil rights appeals heard in the Ninth Circuit, raising questions about the conventional wisdom that politics matters more at higher levels of the judicial hierarchy. We also find that the effect in district courts has increased over time. For cases filed during the Obama presidency, Republican appointees caused pro-defendant outcomes in 7.4% more cases than Democratic appointees. Our results suggest that district courts are an important—although neglected—subject of research for political scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punishment scholars acknowledge the fundamental importance of both prosecutorial discretion and jurisdictional variation in punishment; yet, little is known about the extent to which charging practices vary across court contexts. This is especially true in the federal criminal justice system. This research investigates this issue by linking four years of charging data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) to corresponding data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC). It incorporates unique information on district court contexts from a variety of sources to investigate jurisdictional variation in charge reductions. Findings provide evidence that federal charging practices vary across district courts. In particular, several structural court characteristics are significantly related to the likelihood of charge reduction for similarly-situated defendants. Results from this study are interpreted through the lens of contemporary legal perspectives on court communities and suggest several fruitful directions for additional research on the social contexts of criminal prosecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines represent a uniform set of formal rules that are implemented across a broad range of diverse social contexts. Drawing from neo-institutional theory and kindred perspectives on criminal courts, we argue that the federal courts represent an organizational field in which local influences play a key role in conformity to institutional rules. We use unique survey data from federal judges, aggregated to the district court level and combined with individual-level federal sentencing data, to examine hierarchical models of judicial departures from the Guidelines. Our analysis includes more proximate measures of court community culture than prior research. We find that the collective views of federal judges, including their perceptions of the degree of regulative constraint posed by the Guidelines, as well as the extent to which the Guidelines are normatively and morally legitimate, are intimately related to variation in judicial Guidelines departures across district courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 1938 diversity jurisdiction case Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (Erie) in relation to a debate about whether a U.S. federal district court that is hearing a case under its diversity jurisdiction is required to use the preliminary injunction standard that would be applied by a court of general civil jurisdiction where the federal court is located. American civil procedure, forum shopping, and legal presumptions are assessed.

We test the proposition that litigation outcomes in the Ninth Circuit are significantly more activist and liberal on all federal court cases filed over a 20-year time period in which a U.S. executive agency, the USDA Forest Service, was a defendant in a lawsuit challenging a land management decision. Our results reveal that the Ninth Circuit was not significantly more likely to reverse agency decisions in the liberal direction; however, the District Courts located in the Ninth Circuit were. Additionally, opinions that all Circuits', including the Ninth Circuit, judicial panels opted to publish were significantly more likely to reverse agency action and be in the liberal direction. One consistent and statistically significant finding was that any reversal of agency action, not just those that are published, were much more likely to be in the liberal direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American trial court judges’ roles and behavior vary greatly from their appellate court brethren. One such area of difference has to do with opinion writing behavior, an area where trial judges hold a great deal of discretion in determining whether to write an opinion and, if they do, how long the opinion should be. To examine what factors determine opinion writing behavior among district court judges, this study relies on analyses of an original dataset of civil cases that terminated in eighteen federal district courts from 2000 to 2006. The results indicate that legal, hierarchical, and institutional features are critical in motivating opinion writing and opinion length and that personal factors have very limited effects. The fruits of this exercise have important implications for how we view and model the behavior of trial court judges in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides an overview of the increased use of administrative proceedings and enforcement powers by the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) and outlined some of the challenge and criticism faced by the SEC's along with its history, benefits and the growth. SEC claims that Administrative Law Courts (ALCs) offer benefits over traditional district courts and provides less protections than the federal courts for defendants and due to this it suffers a number of losses in court.

The article informs that Michael Nelson of Watch House International has filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging he was terminated by his Watch House International LLC in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Chapter 21 of Texas Labor Code. It mentions Nelson filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas and Watch House moved to compel arbitration. It also mentions ruling of the Texas Supreme Court in a case related to In re Halliburton Co.

The article discusses the U.S. common law doctrine of stare decisis and its role in U.S. federal courts and at the agency the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). According to the article, stare decisis does not apply to agencies such as the ITC. It examines why U.S. government agencies can ignore precedents, how U.S. appeals courts review such decisions, and discusses several ITC decisions, including Amgen, Inc. v. U.S. Int'l Trade Comm'n.

The article presents proposals for reducing inconsistency in social security cases in U.S. federal district courts. Topics include the calls for social security reform in the U.S. in 2014, how the federal judiciary processes Social Security disability benefit appeals, and the power of precedent. Information is provided on how to increase social security law interpretation consistency in district courts.

The article discusses the U.S. Federal Courts Jurisdiction and Venue Clarification Act (JVCA) of 2011. Topics discussed include transferring of case to any district as per the convenience of parties and witnesses, no uniformity of district courts, and analyzing how the new addition to the statute affects the forum selection clause in contracts.

This article examines the conditions under which Congress passes jurisdiction-granting legislation, which expands the discretion of the federal district courts by designating them as policy venues. This project extends existing research that has demonstrated that Congress manipulates the parameters of jurisdiction by examining how Congress routinely engages in this activity. I construct and evaluate a comprehensive data set of laws in which Congress grants jurisdiction to the district courts for the period between 1949-2006 (81st-109th Congress). I consider the effect of separation-of-powers and ideological distance on the decision to grant jurisdiction. The results demonstrate that both separation-of-powers and ideological concerns influence such decisions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision of the Second Circuit in United States v. Finnerty (Finnerty lit) was the culmination of a number of District Court decisions that found that specialists on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) could not be held liable for fraud under Rule 10b-5 for interpositioning, whereby they put themselves between buy and sell limit orders, in violation of NYSE rules, and profited on the spread. Finnerty III and its District Court sibling decisions were wrongly decided. Specialists presented a uniquely thorny issue of agency law to the Federal Courts in New York. This issue was under-analyzed by the Federal Prosecutors and left the courts without a coherent theory of fiduciary duty for specialists. This Note will demonstrate that there is a fiduciary relationship between specialists and their public customers and will untangle that relationship to show that it prohibits interpositioning and that interpositioning was fraud under Rule 10b-5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the split between district courts in nations over the ordering of restitution in child pornography possession cases. It offers brief information on the developments of the problem, along with the analysis how federal courts have dealt restitution in possession cases particularly on the role played by proximate causation in a court's final disposition on restitution. The calculation of restitution awards in possession cases and other derivative issues are discussed. Also explores are the constitutional dimensions of restitution awards and its risks in violation the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines.

One of the important goals of the federal sentencing guidelines was to reduce inter-judge disparity in sentencing. In this paper, we test the assumption that structuring discretion produced uniformity in federal sentencing and consistency in the process by which judges arrive at the appropriate sentence. We also examine whether background characteristics of judges affect the sentences they impose on similarly situated offenders. We used hierarchical linear modeling, nesting the offenders in the judges that sentenced them in order to examine the sentencing decisions of federal judges in three U.S. District Courts. While we found that significant variation between judges in sentencing is largely accounted for by our level 1 characteristics, we also found that judges arrive at decisions regarding the appropriate sentence in different ways, by attaching differential weights to several of the legally relevant case characteristics and legally irrelevant offender characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the U.S. Supreme Court held that U.S. courts have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241 to hear legal challenges on behalf of persons detained at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in connection with the war against terrorism (Rasul v. Bush), the Pentagon established administrative hearings, called "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" (CSRTs), to allow the detainees to contest their status as enemy combatants, and informed them of their right to pursue relief in federal court by seeking a writ of habeas corpus. Lawyers subsequently filed dozens of petitions on behalf of the detainees in the District Court for the District of Columbia, where district court judges reached inconsistent conclusions as to whether the detainees have any enforceable rights to challenge their treatment and detention. hi December 2005, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA) to divest the courts ofjurisdiction to hear some detainees' challenges by eliminating the federal courts' statutory jurisdiction over habeas claims by aliens detained at Guantanamo Bay (as well as other causes of action based on their treatment or living conditions). The DTA provided instead for limited appeals of CSRT determinations or fmal decisions of military commissions. After the Supreme Court rejected the view that the DTA left it without jurisdiction to review a habeas challenge to the validity of military commissions in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the 109th Congress enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) (P.L. 109-366) to authorize the President to convene military commissions and to amend the DTA to further reduce access to federal courts by "alien enemy combatants," wherever held, by eliminating pending and future causes of action other than the limited review of military proceedings permitted under the DTA. In June 2008, the Supreme Court held in the case of Boumediene v. Bush that aliens designated as enemy combatants and detained at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus. The Court also found that MCA § 7, which limited judicial review of executive determinations of the petitioners' enemy combatant status, did not provide an adequate habeas substitute and therefore acted as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas. The immediate impact of the Boumediene decision is that detainees at Guantanamo may petition a federal district court for habeas review of the legality and possibly the circumstances of their detention, perhaps including challenges to the jurisdiction of military commissions. President Barack Obama's Executive Order calling for an at least temporary halt in military commission proceedings and the closure of the Guantanamo detention facility is likely to have implications for legal challenges raised by detainees. In March 2009, the Obama Administration announced a new defmitional standard for the government's authority to detain terrorist suspects, which does not use the phrase "enemy combatant" to refer to persons who may be properly detained. The new standard is similar in scope to the "enemy combatant" standard used by the Bush Administration to detain terrorist suspects. The standard would permit the detention of members of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and associated forces, along with persons who provide "substantial support" to such groups, regardless of whether such persons were captured away from the battlefield in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case Vaden v. Discover Bank, wherein the plaintiff questions if federal courts have subject-matter jurisdiction to entertain petitions to compel arbitration under the section 4 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in the U.S. The Supreme Court (SC) clarified that parties can request for a federal district court to enforce arbitrary agreement under section 4 petition. Thus, SC might also clarify state courts' responsibilities over arbitrary agreement if necessary.

Does the hierarchical relationship between the district courts and the courts of appeals influence decision making at the trial level? Do these judges anticipate responses by appellate panels and condition their decisions based on these expectations? Using a sample of district court cases from 1925 to 1996 that were subsequently reviewed by the courts of appeals, and incorporating a strategic choice statistical framework, I discover that the district courts are constrained by the anticipated responses of the appeals courts. However, this conclusion is not apparent if one analyzes the data using traditional maximum likelihood methods. Only when empirical analyses specifically model underlying strategic relationships does one discover this constraint. If the federal trial judges anticipate a negative response on appeal, then they curtail their ideological influences (the magnitude of influence decreases by approximately one-half). This pattern remains consistent when one examines civil liberties and economic cases, but not for criminal cases. Thus, the hierarchical structure of the federal judiciary appears to exert a significant constraint on the district courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the significance of the Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) in the U.S., which allows a district court to enter an order requiring parties to comply with a no waiver or "clawback" provision pertaining to the disclosure of communications. It also states that the nonwaiver protections of the rule are necessary because they extend beyond the pending litigation to other federal or state proceedings. It further briefs several advantages of the rule.

The author reflects on the use of cameras in courtrooms as the most effective means of providing public access in the U.S. The author refers to the issued statement from the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council which allowed the limited use of cameras in federal district courts within the circuit on an experimental basis. Upon the non-court trials, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court has also approved but not on Internet broadcasting because of possible legal technicalities.