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The report recognizes that innovation—the process through which new ideas are generated and successfully introduced in the marketplace—is a primary driver of U.S. economic growth and national 2 competitiveness.1 U.S. companies’ use of patents, copyright, and trade secrecy to protect their creations, and trademarks to distinguish their goods and services from those of competitors represent important supports for innovation, enabling firms to capture market share, which contributes to growth in our economy. The granting and protection of intellectual property rights is vital to promoting innovation and creativity and is an essential element of our free enterprise, market-based system. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are the principal means used to establish ownership of inventions and creative ideas in their various forms, providing a legal foundation to generate tangible benefits from innovation for companies, workers, and consumers. Without this framework, the creators of intellectual property would tend to lose the economic fruits of their own work, thereby undermining the incentives to undertake the investments necessary to develop the IP in the first place.2 Moreover, without IP protection, the inventor who had invested time and money in developing the new product or service (sunk costs) would always be at a disadvantage to the new firm that could just copy and market the product without having to recoup any sunk costs or pay the higher salaries required by those with the creative talents and skills. As a result, the benefits associated with American ingenuity would tend to more easily flow outside the United States. The report finds that IP is used everywhere in the economy, and IP rights support innovation and creativity in virtually every U.S. industry. While IP rights play a large role in generating economic growth, too little attention has been given to identifying which industries produce or use significant amounts of IP and rely most intensively on these rights. The report was written to give policy makers and the public more information about the impacts of IP protection in the U.S. economy on which to base sound policy.

In recent years, a great many studies of the real-world impact of patenting on innovation and economic growth (many available for free on ssrn.com) point to its beneficial effects. Arrow (1962), Griliches (1963), Schmookler (1966), Kitch (1977), Reinganum (1981), Tirole (1988), Klemperer (1990), Romer (1990), Giulbert and Shapiro (1990), Grossman and Helpman (1991), Aghion and Howitt (1992), Scotchmer (1999), and Gallini (2002) all found that patents foster ex ante innovation — meaning, they induce people to invent because of the prospect of reward. Invention, it has been shown, is driven primarily not by genius or happenstance but rather by markets and the expectation of the profit that can be gained by securing the patent rights to new technologies. Zorina Khan of Bowdoin College and the late Kenneth Sokoloff at UCLA found that among the “great inventors” of the 19th century, “their patterns of patenting were procyclical [and] responded to expected profit opportunities.” And as Khan noted elsewhere, “Ordinary people [are] stimulated by higher perceived returns or demand-side incentives to make long-term commitments to inventive activity.” By contrast, in countries without patent rights, Barro (1995) found that people have an “excessive incentive to copy” and insufficient incentive to invent for themselves. Moser (2004), meanwhile, reported that “inventors in countries without patent laws focus on a small set of industries … while innovation in countries with patent laws [is] much more diversified.” The evidence that patents foster innovation is not confined solely to the U.S. or even to developed countries. In 2008, a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that “stronger levels of patent protection are positively and significantly associated with inflows of high-tech product [and] expenditures on R&D.” And in a study that attracted wide attention, Shih-Tse Lo of Concordia University in Montreal reported that the reforms strengthening the Taiwanese patent system in 1986 “stimulated additional inventive activity, especially in industries where patent protection is generally regarded as an effective strategy for extracting returns, and in industries which are more R&D intensive. The reforms also seemed to induce additional foreign direct investment in Taiwan.” But such benefits did not accrue across all sectors of the economy. “For industries that chiefly use other mechanisms to extract returns from their innovations, such as [trade] secrecy, the strengthening of patent rights had little effect on their inventive activity.” In addition to encouraging ex ante innovation, Acemoglu, Bimpikis, and Ozdaglar (2008) discovered that “patents [also] improve the allocation of resources by encouraging rapid experimentation and efficient ex post transfer of knowledge across firms.” Given that patents grant exclusionary rights, some will be surprised to learn that the patent system is actually one of the most effective tools for knowledge-sharing and technology transfer ever devised. A 2006 study by French economists Francois Leveque and Yann Meniere found that 88 percent of U.S., European, and Japanese businesses rely upon the information disclosed in patents to keep up with technology advances and direct their own R&D efforts. This is hardly a new phenomenon. The inventor Elias E. Reis reported that when he read in the Official Gazette in 1886 about a patent issued to Elihu Thomson for a new method of electric welding, “there immediately opened up to my mind a field of new applications to which I saw I could apply my system of producing heat in large quantities.” And Thomas Edison was known to frequent the patent office to study other inventors’ patents and spark ideas of his own. Indeed, new research published last year found that rather than blocking development, Thomas Edison’s seminal 1880 incandescent lamp patent (No. 223,898) actually “stimulated downstream development work” that resulted in “new technologies of commercial significance [including] the Tesla coil, hermetically sealed connectors, chemical vapor deposition process, tungsten lamp filaments and phosphorescent lighting that led to today’s fluorescent lamps.” As Sokoloff and Naomi Lamoreaux at Yale (1997) observe, “The very act of establishing exclusive property rights in invention not only protected patentees but also promoted the diffusion of information about technology. To see why, imagine a world in which there was no patent system to guarantee inventors property rights to their discoveries. In such a world, inventors would have every incentive to be secretive and to guard jealously their discoveries from competitors [because those discoveries] could, of course, be copied with impunity. “By contrast,” they noted, “in a world where property rights in invention were protected, the situation would be very different. Inventors would now feel free to promote their discoveries as widely as possible so as to maximize returns either from commercializing their ideas themselves or from [licensing] rights to the idea to others. The protections offered by the patent system would thus be an important stimulus to the exchange of technological information in and of themselves. Moreover, it is likely that the cross-fertilization that resulted from these information flows would be a potent stimulus to technological change.”

While most economic scholarship analyzing the importance of the courts has focused on disputes over real property, the relationship between the court system and investment is no less strong for intellectual property. And to a large extent, the relationship between the courts and the patent system depends on the quality of “judicial human capital.”

In the United States, as in many countries, the courts are a crucial part of the patent system to the extent that the patent system is can be termed a two-stage process. In the first stage, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants property rights to inventors. In the second stage, inventors can protect those rights through patent infringement suits in the courts and alleged infringers have the right to challenge improvidently granted patents and have them declared invalid. As a consequence, some authors have referred to patent rights as being “probabilistic,” depending not only on whether the innovation embodied in the patent has commercial value, but also on the refinement of that patent property right after litigation.15

Patents are hardly the only way innovators can protect their investments, but they are one of the most prevalent. As will be explored, patent pendency hurts innovators but may have further ramifications to noninventive society. As patent backlogs continue to linger at major worldwide patent offices, the stress of pending applications may force an examiner’s hand into issuing suboptimal patents, which further reverberates throughout the patent world. As such, pendency can reciprocally harm patent offices in reputation and revenue.

A related problem is that under the current U.S. system, several district courts hear a high volume of patent cases and are overloaded with work. After the Supreme Court's decision regarding venue in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, patent litigation soared in the District of Delaware, Central District of California, and Northern District of California. Yet, judicial appointments and new judgeships have not kept pace in these [*917] courts. This has led to overburdened judges turning to creative strategies to keep up with their growing patent dockets, such as staying cases while the PTAB undertakes inter partes review.

P8. We have no quarrel with the point at which the balance between merits (justice) and process (efficiency) intersects in most civil and criminal litigation. In fact, merits may be difficult to determine in the majority of cases simply because we possess no infallible method to determine with certainty historical facts. Fair, not perfect, process is all that is required. United States v. Hasting, 461 U.S. 499, 508-09 (1983) ("no such thing as an error-free, perfect trial, and ... Constitution does not guarantee such a trial"). Indeed, fair process may be an appropriate surrogate for right merits. Judicial resources are finite. If lavished or squandered on one piece of litigation, they are not available for use on another piece of litigation. Thus, justice rendered in one case is justice denied in the other. Nevertheless, we vigorously argue in these materials that litigation itself is not fungible. Some cases are more important than others, not to the litigants, but to the society. Litigation rightly raising free speech or expressive conduct issues is more important than other kinds of litigation. See supra note 133 (while individual rights are personal, free speech issues warrant special standing rules). Accordingly, we identify in these materials in each particular context where and when the present standards of review for speech or expressed conduct and personal responsibility in the federal criminal law must be more faithfully applied or rethought and reformulated, that is, particularized in light of the importance of these values, which are insistently implicated in this kind of litigation in a free society.

In each of the eight previous TROs obtained by plaintiff, as well as the two previous TROs obtained by defendant, and also in regard to the eight previous contempt charges between them, (all of which were ultimately dismissed prior to an adjudicatory hearing), the local police department (usually the Cherry Hill Police Department) had to investigate the allegations of domestic violence, and the allegations then had to be presented to the municipal court judge so that a TRO determination could be made.  Rule 5:7A. In most of the domestic violence allegations, or allegations of violations of TROs, police reports were prepared by the investigating police department, and after the matter was presented to the municipal court judge and the TROs were issued, the TROs had to be processed by the domestic violence unit of the Family Division in the Superior Court, **311 and set down for a hearing date to determine if an FRO should be issued.  The resources of both law enforcement and the court system are finite, and time and personnel *578 spent on this plaintiff's TROs represents lost time and resources not being spent on domestic violence matters and other emergent matters that might otherwise warrant greater attention than may have been received.  The TRO history of these parties has made a mockery of the Domestic Violence Act, and trivializes same.  The Appellate Division noted, in a different context, that "There are too many substantial and significant domestic violence matters requiring the urgent attention of the court system to squander judicial and prosecutorial resources on patently unmeritorious litigation......" State v. Wilmouth, 302 N.J.Super. 20, 23, 694 A.2d 584 (App.Div.1997).  In the present case, the court is less concerned that the numerous previous TROs were "unmeritorious" than it is concerned that the constant cycle of obtaining a TRO and then shortly thereafter dismissing the TRO is squandering judicial and law enforcement resources and diverting attention from urgent and meritorious domestic violence matters.  It should be noted that, according to records obtained from the Administrative Office of the Courts, in calendar year 2000 there were 36,021 TROs issued statewide, with 3,528 TROs being issued in Camden County.  Camden County was second only to Essex County in the amount of TROs issued during that year.

n80. See, e.g., Friedenthal et al., supra note 34, 14.3, at 653 ("The interest of the judicial system in preventing relitigation of the same dispute recognizes that judicial resources are finite and the number of cases that can be heard by the courts is limited. Every dispute that is reheard means that another will be delayed. As modern court dockets are filled to overflowing, this concern is of critical importance. Res judicata thus conserves scarce judicial resources and promotes efficiency in the interest of the public at large.").

Concern over excessive litigation in the federal courts is old hat ... [and] also typically exaggeration... . The truth about the "litigation explosion' is that it is a weapon of perception, not substance. If the public can be persuaded that there is a litigation crisis, it may support efforts to cut back on litigation access.

If we take my argument in Part II as a given--that is, if we assume for present purposes that claims provide valuable but imperfect information about the invention--then what should a court do with them as a policy matter? A common intuition holds that a court's job is to reach the most accurate outcome possible. That is, a court should try to discern the real invention and the optimal patent scope. Of course, even in an individual case, a court is constrained in its pursuit of accuracy by finite adjudication resources. Courts cannot realistically hold multiyear trials, nor can they summon thousands of experts. Thus, our initial focus on accuracy must be qualified: courts should attempt to achieve the most accurate outcome given their available resources. Notwithstanding such resource constraints, however, the intuition is that no artificial limits should be imposed. Within this paradigm, a court should allocate its budget to maximize its ability to pursue the truth: the court should collect as much evidence as feasible and then consider all that evidence on an equal basis. By equal weight, I do not mean that a court would say the following: "Witness A, the upstanding citizen, says the defendant stabbed the victim, while Witness B, the known habitual liar, says the defendant did not, and because all evidence is given equal weight, the result is a toss-up." Rather, I mean that a court will consider all the evidence in light of its credibility and in the totality of the circumstances, to get to the result that is most likely to reflect the underlying factual truth on the question at issue. The contradistinction is to a regime where courts are required by a preset rule to favor or disfavor certain types of evidence. For example, a court that excludes a bloody knife that the police obtained through an illegal search thereby gives this evidence zero weight. The court does so not because it thinks that the knife is unreliable evidence or that the underlying factual truth is that the defendant is innocent. It does so because the preset exclusionary rule mandates that courts accord zero weight to evidence obtained through illegal searches. By definition, therefore, a court that is seeking to maximize accuracy in an individual case would consider equally all the available evidence. But this formulation is not just a rhetorical trick. The substantive point is that, if the goal is simply to maximize accuracy, the law should rarely have categorical rules that exclude or disfavor broad swaths of evidence. It should instead [*547] use a totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry that considers both the claim text and all reasonably collectible extrinsic evidence. And such totality-of-the-circumstances inquiries are what Corbin and his fellow travelers in patent law generally propose.

In the background of these decisions are limited resources. Judicial vacancies, or resource constraints more generally, may impact the number of cases that can be prosecuted and tried. When there are fewer judges available, prosecutors may incur costs from prosecuting a case regardless of whether the defendant ultimately goes to trial. For instance, the Speedy Trial Act of 1974 establishes time limits for completing various stages of a federal criminal prosecution. In general, the Act requires the government to file an indictment within 30 days of a defendant’s arrest. If a defendant enters a plea of not guilty, he or she must be tried within 70 days of the indictment, which can be extended if a judge grants a continuance.4

How binding is the constraint imposed by the Speedy Trial Act during judicial vacancies? While data on the number of speedy trial violations over time is lacking, anecdotal evidence suggests that judges are unwilling to perpetually extend the time required to go to trial, noting that unless vacancies are filled, they would be required to dismiss some criminal cases.5 In 2010, the American Bar Association noted that the strain judicial vacancies imposed on caseloads forced federal judges to allocate their limited time to criminal cases because of “speedy trial rules that require them to put criminal cases first,” resulting in civil proceedings being put off.6 In fact, judicial vacancies have posed such severe speedy trial issues that in January 2011, the federal district court in Arizona enacted a year-long, emergency suspension of the mandated speedy trial time limitations because of the court’s shortage in judges.

Proponents of access to justice advocate more egalitarian distributions not only of party resources, but also of judicial resources. By "judicial resources" I mean judicial personnel (judges, court staff, and jurors), the time and attention of those personnel, and the financial and other wherewithal of courts, as well as the ways in which procedural rules and doctrines allocate those other resources. The basic demand of access to justice with respect to judicial resources is that they be distributed more or less equally across different categories of cases and different groups of litigants. Conversely, access to justice is undermined when a larger [*1491] share of judicial resources is devoted to certain, favored categories of cases than to other, disfavored ones. Although rarely presented in such stark terms, the demand for a more egalitarian distribution of judicial resources is implicit in certain critiques of contemporary civil practice. Many of those critiques fault courts for focusing unduly on "big" or "complex" cases (often with larger financial stakes) at the expense of more routine cases, skewing the distribution of judicial resources in favor of the former. There are several different mechanisms through which such maldistribution of judicial resources can occur. In the most direct mechanism, courts foreclose a particular cause of action, effectively withdrawing all judicial resources from that category of litigation so that they can be reserved for other, "more important" cases. This occurs, for instance, when courts embrace the "floodgates" argument, the idea that certain sorts of law suits should not be allowed because to do so would 'swamp' the courts with litigation. The court supposes that if it were to allow that type of suit it would lack the time to consider promptly enough other law suits aiming to vindicate rights that are, taken together, more important than the rights it therefore proposes to bar. The access-to-justice concern with the floodgates argument is that courts invoke it disproportionately to avoid having to deal with disfavored claims typically brought by disfavored groups of litigants, such as prisoners or discrimination plaintiffs. When they do so, courts are effectively reallocating their resources away from those disfavored cases toward ones deemed more important. Courts can also end up distributing judicial resources among different categories of cases somewhat more indirectly, simply by devoting more time and attention to some and thereby leaving less for others. This seems to be one potential concern with the practice that Judith Resnik has dubbed "managerial judging," whereby judges focus on the "managerial" tasks associated with shepherding cases through the pretrial phase (usually resulting in settlement) at the expense of the more traditionally "adjudicatory" tasks associated with actually deciding cases on the merits. Criticisms of managerial judging have tended to focus on [*1492] the practice's costs for managed cases, particularly the risk that judges will abuse their power to prematurely terminate potentially meritorious lawsuits. But managerial judging might also have more systemic implications for the distribution of judicial resources. In particular, insofar as more complex cases require more case management, judges who adopt a more managerial posture will end up spending more time and attention on complex cases than they otherwise would, necessarily reducing the time and attention they have to spend on more routine cases. The prevalence of managerial judging can thereby end up slighting routine cases. Once again, from an access-to-justice perspective, the worry is that courts are giving certain categories of cases short shrift so that they can focus on the ones that, from many judges' perspectives, really matter.

Courts have limited resources, so methods of streamlining disputes when there is controlling precedent benefit everyone. In patent litigation, efficiency is especially important. Patent trials require an additional procedure of claim construction, known as a Markman hearing. The median time for a patent case to reach trial is 2.4 years, and the cost of patent litigation is also very high. Using stare decisis to resolve aspects of the case can shift attention to the remaining contentious issues. Both Kimble and Marvel were unaware of Brulotte when drafting their settlement agreement, so while these parties had no strong reliance, other parties over the years have relied on Brulotte. Decisions that affect property and contracts have an increased likelihood of reliance. When people can trust the continuity of the law, they are more encouraged to make deals and "arrange their affairs with confidence."

Despite these criticisms, Congress's decision to create the Federal Circuit has been, from most perspectives, a "success." Industry groups are largely satisfied with the court, other countries have begun imitating the U.S. patent institutional structures, and generalized appellate courts have rarely complained about the absence of patent cases on their dockets. As hoped, the court's virtual monopoly over patent appeals has eliminated patent forum shopping, at least at the appellate level. The court has also implemented a number of procedural and case management innovations that have improved the predictability of patent [*978] enforceability and standardized various aspects of patent litigation. Most importantly, some observers credit the court with making substantive alterations to patent jurisprudence that have resulted in increased predictability across the most critical aspects of patent enforcement including infringement, validity, and licensing.

The principal goal of the American patent system is to stimulate innovation, as manifested in the Constitution's articulation of Congress's power "To promote the Progress of … useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to … Inventors the exclusive Right to their … writings and discoveries." Stimulation occurs by rewarding inventors with a time-limited exclusive patent right for taking two steps they typically would not otherwise take: to invent in the first instance and to reveal information to the public about these inventions, thereby enabling other innovators to build on earlier insights. The government will grant a utility patent for an invention only if it is novel, nonobvious "at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art," and "useful." The Patent Act also requires disclosure of certain content within the patent by calling for a "written description," "enablement," and "best mode." The written-description requirement ensures that the inventor is in possession of the claimed invention. To enable the invention, the patent applicant must demonstrate in the specification to "any person skilled in the [relevant] art [how] … to make and use the [invention]" without "undue experimentation." Also, the patent applicant must set out "the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention." The best mode requirement is met so long as the [*1451] patent document objectively discloses the best mode that the inventor subjectively conceived by the time the inventor filed the patent application. Patents are granted after successfully undergoing examination by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), an administrative agency within the Department of Commerce, to ascertain that an invention meets the patentability conditions and that the description in the patent application satisfies the disclosure requirements. The patent's scope is defined principally by its claims, which "particularly point[] out and distinctly claim[] the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention." The patent right permits the patentee to exclude others from practicing the invention claimed in the patent for a term of typically twenty years from the date the patent application was filed. With this primer on substantive patent law, I turn to the institutional structure of patent litigation, focusing on both district courts and the Federal Circuit. Section A sets out the venue rules in the district courts. Section B discusses the Federal Circuit, the centralized and specialized appeals court for almost all patent litigation. Section C then describes the interaction between the district courts and the Federal Circuit by laying out the standards under which the Federal Circuit reviews patent decisions by the district courts. A. Venue Rules in District Courts Patent litigation is generally distinct from other federal causes of action, in that there is but one choice - the Federal Circuit - for almost all appeals from whichever district court a litigant chose as the court in the first instance. However, given patent law's permissive venue rules, a patent plaintiff may frequently choose to initiate a lawsuit in virtually any federal district court. [*1452] In the American patent system, the power to adjudicate patent disputes is vested exclusively in the federal courts. Venue rules dictate which of these courts can entertain particular patent cases, assuming personal jurisdiction over the defendants also exists in that court. Venue rules typically seek to ensure a convenient forum for litigation, particularly for the defendant, who has been haled into court, but these rules differ depending on the type of patent suit and status of the defendant.

Climate changes are already affecting US water resources, and the consequences for communities, health, and the environment will worsen

The science is unambiguous, as shown in the long series of US National Climate Assessments, reports from the US National Academies of Science, and other national and international scientific reviews (US Global Change Research Program 2020). Rising temperatures affect both water supply and demand. Rapidly melting snow and ice mean floods in spring, droughts in summer, and new threats to hydropower production. Rising sea levels threaten coastal communities, groundwater, and wetlands.

Climate change and nuclear weapons represent two key threats of our time. Climate change endangers ecosystems and social systems all over the world. The degradation of natural resources, the decline of water and food supplies, forced migration, and more frequent and intense disasters will greatly affect population clusters, big and small. Climate-related shocks will add stress to the world’s existing conflicts and act as a “threat multiplier” in already fragile regions. This could contribute to a decline of international stability and trigger hostility between people and nations. Meanwhile, the 15,500 nuclear weapons that remain in the arsenals of only a few states possess the destructive force to destroy life on Earth as we know multiple times over. With nuclear deterrence strategies still in place, and hundreds of weapons on ‘hair trigger alert’, the risks of nuclear war caused by accident, miscalculation or intent remain plentiful and imminent. Despite growing recognition that climate change and nuclear weapons pose critical security risks, the linkages between both threats are largely ignored. However, nuclear and climate risks interfere with each other in a mutually enforcing way. Conflicts induced by climate change could contribute to global insecurity, which, in turn, could enhance the chance of a nuclear weapon being used, could create more fertile breeding grounds for terrorism, including nuclear terrorism, and could feed the ambitions among some states to acquire nuclear arms. Furthermore, as evidenced by a series of incidents in recent years, extreme weather events, environmental degradation and major seismic events can directly impact the safety and security of nuclear installations. Moreover, a nuclear war could lead to a rapid and prolonged drop in average global temperatures and significantly disrupt the global climate for years to come, which would have disastrous implications for agriculture, threatening the food supply for most of the world. Finally, climate change, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy pose threats of intergenerational harm, as evidenced by the transgenerational effects of nuclear testing and nuclear power accidents and the lasting impacts on the climate, environment and public health by carbon emissions.

This event, known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, happened only about ten million years after the dinosaurs were smashed by an asteroid impact. This ‘hyperthermal’ period took place quite suddenly (in geological terms)—in less than 2000 years—and lasted for about 170,000 years before the planet again cooled. The heat spike was accompanied by a major wipe-out of ocean life in particular, though most small land mammals survived. Investigating the records of old marine sediments Zeebe was able to show there had been a sharp, 70 %, leap in atmospheric CO 2 concentrations at the time. However, he concluded there was only sufficient carbon available to force the climate to warm by 1–3 °C and that some other mechanism must have been triggered by the initial warming, which then drove the Earth’s temperature to fever pitch, up by another 4–6 °C (Zeebe et al. 2009). This process is the ‘ runaway global warming ‘ which now menaces us.

The significance of PETM is that it appears that about the same volume of carbon was dumped by natural processes into the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans as humans are currently dumping with the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of the world’s forests—about 3 trillion tonnes in all—and it was this that triggered the hyperthermal surge in planetary heating.

P8. We have no quarrel with the point at which the balance between merits (justice) and process (efficiency) intersects in most civil and criminal litigation. In fact, merits may be difficult to determine in the majority of cases simply because we possess no infallible method to determine with certainty historical facts. Fair, not perfect, process is all that is required. United States v. Hasting, 461 U.S. 499, 508-09 (1983) ("no such thing as an error-free, perfect trial, and ... Constitution does not guarantee such a trial"). Indeed, fair process may be an appropriate surrogate for right merits. Judicial resources are finite. If lavished or squandered on one piece of litigation, they are not available for use on another piece of litigation. Thus, justice rendered in one case is justice denied in the other. Nevertheless, we vigorously argue in these materials that litigation itself is not fungible. Some cases are more important than others, not to the litigants, but to the society. Litigation rightly raising free speech or expressive conduct issues is more important than other kinds of litigation. See supra note 133 (while individual rights are personal, free speech issues warrant special standing rules). Accordingly, we identify in these materials in each particular context where and when the present standards of review for speech or expressed conduct and personal responsibility in the federal criminal law must be more faithfully applied or rethought and reformulated, that is, particularized in light of the importance of these values, which are insistently implicated in this kind of litigation in a free society.

In each of the eight previous TROs obtained by plaintiff, as well as the two previous TROs obtained by defendant, and also in regard to the eight previous contempt charges between them, (all of which were ultimately dismissed prior to an adjudicatory hearing), the local police department (usually the Cherry Hill Police Department) had to investigate the allegations of domestic violence, and the allegations then had to be presented to the municipal court judge so that a TRO determination could be made.  Rule 5:7A. In most of the domestic violence allegations, or allegations of violations of TROs, police reports were prepared by the investigating police department, and after the matter was presented to the municipal court judge and the TROs were issued, the TROs had to be processed by the domestic violence unit of the Family Division in the Superior Court, **311 and set down for a hearing date to determine if an FRO should be issued.  The resources of both law enforcement and the court system are finite, and time and personnel *578 spent on this plaintiff's TROs represents lost time and resources not being spent on domestic violence matters and other emergent matters that might otherwise warrant greater attention than may have been received.  The TRO history of these parties has made a mockery of the Domestic Violence Act, and trivializes same.  The Appellate Division noted, in a different context, that "There are too many substantial and significant domestic violence matters requiring the urgent attention of the court system to squander judicial and prosecutorial resources on patently unmeritorious litigation......" State v. Wilmouth, 302 N.J.Super. 20, 23, 694 A.2d 584 (App.Div.1997).  In the present case, the court is less concerned that the numerous previous TROs were "unmeritorious" than it is concerned that the constant cycle of obtaining a TRO and then shortly thereafter dismissing the TRO is squandering judicial and law enforcement resources and diverting attention from urgent and meritorious domestic violence matters.  It should be noted that, according to records obtained from the Administrative Office of the Courts, in calendar year 2000 there were 36,021 TROs issued statewide, with 3,528 TROs being issued in Camden County.  Camden County was second only to Essex County in the amount of TROs issued during that year.