Court Clog DA - GDI 2024

Resolution
Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.
1nc
1nc—GDI Wave 1
Modernization is solving court backlog in the short and long term
Judicial Shop 24
Judicial Shop “Discover Strategies To Make Court Run More Efficiently“, https://judicialshop.com/blogs/news/discover-strategies-to-make-court-run-more-efficiently, 2-8-2024,
Improving evidence management, increasing resources for conflict-free representation, and expanding ways to provide short and long-term relief for overburdened courts are crucial strategies for enhancing access to justice. These measures can help streamline legal proceedings and ensure that individuals have adequate support in navigating the court system. IMPROVED EVIDENCE MANAGEMENT Improved evidence management is critical for streamlining court processes. Digital evidence, with its complexity and volume, necessitates efficient handling to expedite case resolution. Smart court characteristics include ensuring fairness and efficiency of the judiciary, which can be achieved through improved evidence management strategies. This includes digitalization of evidence storage and retrieval systems to enhance accessibility and streamline the presentation of evidence in civil cases. Moreover, modernized evidence management aligns with promoting procedural fairness within the American legal system by ensuring that all parties have equal access to relevant information. Implementing user-friendly electronic filing systems coupled with robust data quality measures further enhances transparency and ensures that evidence is accurately handled throughout legal proceedings. INCREASED RESOURCES FOR CONFLICT-FREE REPRESENTATION Civil courts require additional resources to provide conflict-free representation, ensuring all parties have access to sound legal guidance. Boosting funding for legal aid and pro bono programs is essential to diminish the imbalance in representation and ensure fair outcomes for all individuals involved in legal proceedings. Studies have shown that access to counsel directly impacts the fairness of trials, making it imperative to allocate more resources towards this critical aspect of justice. Furthermore, expanding support for conflict-free representation can significantly enhance the public's trust in the legal system, as individuals are provided with equitable opportunities for adequate representation. EXPANSION OF WAYS TO PROVIDE SHORT AND LONG-TERM RELIEF FOR OVERBURDENED COURTS To alleviate the burden on overburdened courts, a strategic plan by the Federal Judiciary focuses on expanding ways to offer both short and long-term relief. This involves innovative policies developed due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to keep courts open and ensure equitable access to court-related services. Embracing technology has been pivotal for courts, not only in staying operational but also in advancing participation rates and facilitating efficient dispute resolution. These strategies are crucial steps toward achieving more effective court operations, relieving congestion, and improving overall fairness in judicial processes. Moreover, enhancing access to justice initiatives - such as improved evidence management and increased resources for conflict-free representation – play an essential role in this expansion effort.
Expanding IP law uniquely incentivizes patent trolling which floods the courts with frivolous litigation
Bell and Parchomovsky 14
Bell, Abraham-- Professor, Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law; Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law; and Gideon Parchomovsky-- Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School and Professor, Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. 2014. “Reinventing Copyright and Patent.” Michigan Law Review 113 (2): 231–78. https://search-ebscohost-com.gonzaga.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,url,uid&db=lgs&AN=99133160&site=ehost-live.
Intellectual property systems all over the world are modeled on a one size-fits-all principle. Under current patent law, for instance, an invention that meets the patentability criteria is entitled to protection of the law for a specified period.1 Big inventions or small inventions, valuable inventions or worthless inventions—all receive the same scope of protection, and the same variety of legal remedies, for the same period of time. Essentially, all inventions are equal under the law. While one size fits all is easy to administer, it generates two kinds of problems for the patent system. First, the equality principle gives all creators access to the same remedies, even when those remedies create perverse incentives. Scholarly literature has focused on the phenomenon of “patent trolls”—patent holders who have no interest in marketing or manufacturing their inventions but simply wait for apparent breaches of the patent in order to sue.2 While scholars have characterized trolling as a problem of underproductive patents,3 we view it as a problem of incentives. Patents that are enforced by trolls could potentially be valuable to society, but the one-size fits-all system’s excessive litigation rewards incentivize trolls to hoard their patents for opportunistic litigation rather than license them for productive use. Specifically, by providing uniformly large remedies even for very small inventions, the judicial system allows patent trolls to reap more profit through infringement suits than through selling their inventions on the market. This is not intrinsically problematic, but the judicial system is not cost free. Society subsidizes judges, courtrooms, and enforcement measures while litigating parties bear only some of the costs themselves.4 In the case of patent trolls, these societal subsidies encourage parties to conduct their transactions in the courtroom when the optimal forum is actually private market transactions. In many other cases, partly because the costs of litigation are asymmetric and must be paid in part even by prevailing parties, the threat of these litigation costs can force parties into inefficient transactions.5
Clogging the federal courts crushes democracy
Jawando & Wright 15
Michele L. Jawando—Vice President of Legal Progress for Center for American Progress; Sean Wright— policy analyst, Center for American Progress, “Why Courts Matter,” https://www.americanprogress.org/article/why-courts-matter-2-2/, 04/13/2015
No matter the issue—whether it’s marriage equality, voting rights, health care, or immigration—the U.S. federal courts play a vital role in the lives of all Americans. There are two types of courts: state and federal. The federal courts are those established to decide disagreements that concern the Constitution, congressional legislation, and certain state-based disputes. Although most Americans are familiar with the lifetime appointment of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, many are surprised to learn that more than 900 judges have lifetime appointments to serve on lower federal courts, where they hear many more cases than their counterparts on the Supreme Court. Each year, the Supreme Court reviews around 100 of the most significant cases out of the nearly 30 million cases resolved by state and federal courts. These courts hear the majority of cases and, most of the time, they have the final say. That is why, along with the Supreme Court’s justices, the judges who sit on the nation’s federal district and circuit courts are so important. At any given time, there are vacancies on U.S. federal courts that need to be filled. If they are not filled, federal caseloads get backlogged, and as a result, Americans’ access to justice is limited. As of March 9, 2015, there were 50 current vacancies on U.S. federal courts. These seats have been vacant for a total of 22,222 days, resulting in a backlog of 29,892 cases. The Administrative Office of the United States Courts has designated 23 of these pending vacancies as judicial emergencies, meaning that filling them is a critical task. As the Center for American Progress has noted, “in practical terms,” these are the judicial districts “where judges are overworked and where justice is being significantly delayed for the American public. The Constitution dictates that the president appoints federal judges while the Senate advises and consents on these appointments. The result is a delicate balance between the desires of the White House, deference to home-state senators, and the power of the party that controls the Senate. Recently, politics has played a big role in the pace at which judicial nominees are confirmed. In an attempt to slow President Barack Obama’s effect on the federal courts, Senate Republicans have obstructed the president’s judicial nominees at unprecedented levels by attempting to prevent or delay a vote through filibustering a record number of nominees and making them await confirmation for long periods of time. The reason many Senate Republicans have played politics with President Obama’s judicial nominees is because they know the dramatic impact the judiciary can have on policies, including marriage equality and reproductive choice. The fewer judges that President Obama appoints to fill federal judicial vacancies, the greater leverage the next president will have in deciding the make-up of these courts. Yet in the face of unprecedented obstruction, President Obama has made great strides to fill vacancies and to ensure that federal judges meaningfully reflect the dynamic diversity of the nation. A diverse federal bench improves the quality of justice and instills confidence that judges understand the real-world implications of their decisions. Americans have different backgrounds, as well as an assorted set of professional, educational, and life experiences. It is important that the federal courts reflect the diversity of the public they serve. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor once wrote, “The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders.”Furthermore, scholars have found that judges often change their minds during the deliberative process. In one study, researchers concluded that having a woman on the panel affected “elements of both deliberation and bargaining—alternative perspectives, persuasive argument, and horse trading.” Not only do the federal courts play a vital role in preserving democracy, but who sits on the courts has an effect too.
Democratic backsliding causes extinction-- there are multiple scenarios
Orts 18
Dr. Eric W. Orts-- Guardsmark Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics and Professor of Management at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, MA in Political Science from the New School for Social Research, LLM from Columbia Law School, JD from the University of Michigan School of Law, BA in Government from Oberlin College, “Foreign Affairs: Six Future Scenarios (and a Seventh)”, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/foreign-affairs-six-future-scenarios-seventh-eric-orts/, 6/27/2018.
7. Fascist Nationalism. There is another possible future that the Foreign Affairs scenarios do not contemplate, and it’s a dark world in which Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and others construct regimes that are authoritarian and nationalist. Fascism is possible in the United States and elsewhere if big business can be seduced by promises of riches in return for the institutional keys to democracy. Perhaps Foreign Affairs editors are right to leave this dark world out, for it would be very dark: nationalist wars with risks of escalation into global nuclear conflict, further digital militarization (even Terminator-style scenarios of smart military robots), and unchecked climate disasters.
Uniqueness
2nc uq wall—litigation
Litigation is controlled
Emily S. Taylor Poppe 21, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, “Institutional Design for Access to Justice”, UC Irvine Law Review, 11 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 781, February 2021, Lexis
This law-centric orientation is strikingly different from that of most Americans, despite popular claims about their litigiousness. Most individuals never even identify the civil legal problems they experience as "legal." Only a tiny minority will ever seek legal advice in response to a problem, and most are more likely to do nothing than to file a lawsuit. Decades of empirical scholarship have confirmed that despite the prevalence of civil legal problems in everyday life, there is remarkably little recourse to formal law. [FOOTNOTE BEGINS] DAVID M. ENGEL, THE MYTH OF THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY: WHY WE DON'T SUE 3 (2016) (noting that "specious claims of a litigation explosion have been made so often that they have rooted themselves in the national psyche"). [FOOTNOTE ENDS]
Tech overcomes shortfalls of limited resources in the squo
Judicial Shop 24
Judicial Shop “Discover Strategies To Make Court Run More Efficiently“, https://judicialshop.com/blogs/news/discover-strategies-to-make-court-run-more-efficiently, 2-8-2024,
Courts nationwide are implementing modernization principles, leveraging digital technology and data-driven strategies to improve efficiency and accessibility. With the rise of legal tech, courts are prioritizing streamlined case processing and sentencing reforms, aiming to reduce delays and enhance overall system effectiveness. Additionally, global shifts towards online court proceedings during crises reveal a commitment to embracing modernization for improved efficacy. These efforts underscore a concerted push by court leaders to better serve litigants while addressing budget constraints, increasing caseloads, and workforce limitations. Efforts in modernizing civil courts reflect a forward-thinking approach that seeks to balance limited resources with the imperative of delivering fair and accessible justice. Through strategic use of legal technology and data analysis, courts aim to streamline processes while maintaining the integrity of the judicial system. Notably, these advancements align with broader trends in utilizing digital solutions for societal progress—ultimately shaping a more efficient and equitable future for civil courts. CONCLUSION In conclusion, modernizing civil courts is crucial for improving access to justice. Clear and timely information can help individuals navigate legal processes more effectively. Utilizing judges more efficiently and addressing logistical challenges are key strategies to enhance court efficiency. Providing useful resources for court users and taking an innovative approach can contribute to a faster, fairer justice system. By focusing on these strategies, we can work towards a more accessible and efficient court system.
2nc at covid
Tech advancements are providing new mechanisms for resolving backlog in the squo
Reuters 20
Thompson Reuters Legal, “How the backlog may reshape the future of the courts,” https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/backlog-reshape-future-courts, 7/24/20.
As court backlogs continue to grow, everyone is looking for ways to expedite the legal process while maintaining the sanctity of the court. Whether it's judges or law clerks, attorneys or clients, moving things along quickly without sacrificing integrity is imperative. The need to reevaluate how courts can increase efficiency has become more and more critical. The courts have always been considered a pillar of tradition and formality. And sometimes formality slows progress. Legal technology, such as electronic filing and online legal research, helped streamline certain aspects of the court system. But with a growing backlog and no clear plan of how to increase efficiency and improve processes on a large scale, its an extraordinary challenge for the courts. They must learn how to carve a way forward, giving everyone their day in court while ensuring the process is still held to the same high standard. Maneuvering through this environment will involve a great deal of foresight and innovation. What transpires during these times will likely give us insight as to how the courts will continue to progress—and may even offer a glimpse into the court of the future. What have courts been doing so far? Judges, attorneys, and clients have adapted quickly to the virtual courtroom setting. Using tools like Zoom, YouTube, and even Facebook Live, the court system has often kept up with non-jury hearings and other matters while maintaining the standards expected of a public hearing. They have worked through many of the glitches of using legal technology, and they now feel relatively comfortable in this new way of operating. In fact, some judges have noted that virtual courtrooms have increased their efficiency in getting through those proceedings. Going virtual has eliminated the need for judges to travel to different courts; less traveling means they can get through their dockets much more quickly. The same time-saving benefit holds true for attorneys and their clients. Unfortunately, the current inability to conduct virtual jury trials means many criminal and civil proceedings have been stalled. As months go by, those backlogs continue to grow. How will courts get through the backlog? Efficiency in all areas is going to be key in moving ahead and catching up. Courts need to explore their ability to speed things up, and this will be an ongoing necessity. One such way is to quickly adopt new legal research technology that focuses on making courts more efficient. Fortunately, that technology exists. Westlaw Edge's Quick Check Judicial helps judges and law clerks quickly analyze and review multiple documents from a single matter. This can reduce the time the courts—as well as attorneys—need to pore over legal briefs and documents. By decreasing the amount of time it takes to manually check citations and quotations across multiple filings, courts can review documents at a speed not previously possible. This type of dramatic time-saving resolution will be key. Stick with what's working Another way courts would like to get through the backlog is to continue with virtual hearings. There is hope that they will be able to continue holding proceedings for hearings and matters that have been held virtually throughout the pandemic. The increased efficiency that is noted above may be critical to working through the backlog. If that continues, they can more easily get through those cases while also adding back in jury trials and other in-person proceedings.
The backlog from COVID is not relevant to our link story that is about civil cases
Hernandez 24
AMANDA HERNÁNDEZ—reporter on criminal justice for Stateline. Stateline, “Shortage of prosecutors, judges leads to widespread court backlogs”, https://stateline.org/2024/01/25/shortage-of-prosecutors-judges-leads-to-widespread-court-backlogs/#:~:text=Still%20reeling%20from%20the%20COVID,states%2C%20lawmakers%20are%20stepping%20in, JANUARY 25, 2024.
Still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, court systems in many states are working to clear their case backlogs. Some court systems have moved cases faster using virtual court proceedings, court data dashboards and online jury selection. In other states, lawmakers are stepping in. The pandemic worsened problems that already had caused state and local court delays, legal experts say. The hurdles include insufficient funding, judicial vacancies, lawyer shortages and delays processing digital and physical evidence. Some state legislators are particularly focused on shortages of prosecutors and judges. In Georgia, New York and Vermont, for example, lawmakers have filed or plan to offer bills that would increase prosecutor pay, boost the number of judges or streamline procedures to reduce the number of cases. “Managing cases toda

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