Even if courts are generally clogged, those cases are more manageable than complex patent cases.
Menell and Vacca 20, *Koret Professor of Law and Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, **Professor of Law, University of New Hampshire School of Law (*Peter S. Menell, **Ryan Vacca, 2020, “ARTICLE: Revisiting and Confronting the Federal Judiciary Capacity "Crisis": Charting a Path for Federal Judiciary Reform,” 108 Calif. L. Rev. 789, University of Kansas Libraries, Lexis) [[Footnotes]]
Of course, not every case requires the same level of work. A death penalty or patent case takes, on average, far more time and effort than the typical social security benefit or drug possession case. In 2005, the Federal Judicial Center completed a study and updated its protocol for assigning relative weights to different types of civil and criminal cases. 370 To compare the caseload in the early 1970s with today's caseload, we retroactively applied the 2005 case weights to all cases from 1970 through 2017. 371 Figures 4 and 5 show the number of weighted district court cases filed and terminated per year.
[[FN 371]]
371 We recognize that some aspects of cases could have changed over the nearly fifty-year period we examine and that the case weights, even if calculated the same way, could differ from what they are today. Also, we appreciate that the 2005 case weights are not perfect measures as there can be quite a bit of variation within types of cases. For example, a patent infringement suit involving pharmaceuticals is generally more complex than a patent infringement suit involving a simple mechanical invention. Nonetheless, the 2005 protocol provides a consistent, approximate measure of the complexity of cases.
[[END FN 371]]