Generalized courts are critical for stable law AND disruptions spill over between the federal circuit.

Although the Federal Circuit was designed to uniformly handle nearly all patent appeals, district courts remain vital components in creating a sound body of patent law. First, the district court is almost always the only court to play a role in the over 2600 patent cases filed annually, as almost ninety percent of patent cases are settled in the district court. Of the small remainder that are adjudicated on the merits, approximately half are appealed to the Federal Circuit, leaving the district courts as the final arbiters on patent law in the other half. Second, even when the Federal Circuit reviews a district court's patent decision, it typically does not review all of the issues decided by the district court. For those that it does review, the Federal Circuit, at least in theory, must heavily defer to the district courts' factual findings. Because the facts of a case strongly influence the legal outcome in patent law, the district court's factual findings can significantly affect the Federal Circuit's legal decisions. Third, if the district courts are deciding patent cases poorly - or merely unevenly - because of their technical complexity, the Federal Circuit becomes hard-pressed to direct its resources efficiently toward creating an effective body of patent law, as it must focus on correcting errors with which other courts of appeals - facing records developed by judges equipped to prepare them - need not grapple. Fourth, on nonpatent issues, the importance of district court choice is elevated, as regional circuit law applies and local rules affect strategies.

Given how critical district courts are to creating a sound body of patent law, I concentrate in this Part on three criticisms of the institutional structure of patent litigation relating to the district courts' role: first, the widespread forum shopping that takes place in district court patent litigation; second, the poor decisionmaking seen in many district courts on issues of fact and law needed to resolve patent cases; and third, the insufficient deference conferred by the Federal Circuit on those district court factual determinations that are indeed sound.