Here is the latest faculty scholarship from the University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Studies Research Papers series via SSRN.

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Jason Reinecke (UW Law), What Makes Federal Circuit Opinions Influential?, 109 Marq. L. Rev. 717 (2025)

Reinecke draws on a novel, largely hand-coded dataset of nearly 2,700 Federal Circuit decisions issued over more than seven years to ask what drives an opinion’s influence. He finds that some judges are more likely than others to issue binding opinions favoring patent owners, and others favoring patent challengers, and that panels mixing pro-patentee and pro-challenger judges tend to write more moderate, more influential precedential decisions than uniform panels do. The results speak to the broader literature on citation analysis and to a long-running question about the Federal Circuit experiment itself: what are the costs and benefits of vesting so much patent power in a single court?

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Jason Reinecke (UW Law) and Jason Rantanen (University of Iowa College of Law), The Law as Language: A Computational Text Analysis of Judicial Writing Style, Fed. Circ. B.J. (forthcoming)

Reinecke and Rantanen provide the first computational text analysis of Federal Circuit opinions, offering empirical grounding for a literature on judicial style that has mostly stayed theoretical. They find that judges’ writing styles vary considerably, in opinion length, formality, and how often they cite precedent and the record, and that some judges are notably more successful than others at writing clear, concise, complete opinions. The data also hints that Federal Circuit judges may lean more heavily on their law clerks than Supreme Court justices do.

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Jason Reinecke (UW Law), Expert Testimony in Patent Cases, UC Davis L. Rev. (forthcoming)

Patent cases turn heavily on testimony from party-appointed experts, and Reinecke argues that it isn’t working. Courts are misapplying Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and Daubert, admitting expert testimony that lacks scientific validity because the underlying questions are policy-laden legal fictions with no real-world analog. Reinecke proposes two fixes available under current law: greater use of neutral experts under Rule 706, and stricter application of Rule 702 and Daubert to keep testimony tied to an expert’s actual field of experience.

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Kate Finley (UW Law), Prison Evidence, 92 Brooklyn Law Review 2 (forthcoming 2026)

Second look sentencing laws let courts revisit decades-old sentences, premised on the idea that old, overly punitive assumptions about incorrigibility were wrong. But Finley shows that almost all of these laws ask judges to evaluate rehabilitation using evidence generated by prison systems: program completion records, conduct reports, and the like. Her worry is that this trades one flawed assumption for another, namely that a prison’s account of a person’s life in custody is reliable and that prisons are generally places of rehabilitation. Finley proposes realistic ways for courts to account for the realities of prison in second look review.

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Peter Carstensen (UW Law and American Antitrust Institute), The Curdling of Milk Markets: Antiquated Statutes, Enforcement Failure, and Market Manipulation Harming Farmers, Processors, and Consumers, 60 Indiana Law Review (forthcoming 2026)

The Federal Milk Market Order system, a holdover from the Great Depression, largely sets the price paid for raw milk and hands large dairy cooperatives substantial control over market access. Carstensen walks through the complicated price-discrimination model behind the system, tied ultimately to the prices of butter, cheese, dried whey, and dried skim milk, and argues that the USDA has authority to address the resulting abuses but has failed to use it. His conclusion: either repeal the statute outright or pursue major reform, since neither legislative nor administrative fixes currently look likely.

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Arti Walker-Peddakotla (UW Law), Resisting Surveillance Procurement, 74.3 Buffalo Law Review (forthcoming 2026)

Most surveillance scholarship focuses on regulating technology after it’s deployed. Walker-Peddakotla looks earlier in the process, at the municipal procurement decisions and backdoor conversations that determine whether police surveillance technology gets purchased in the first place, a dynamic she calls “acquiescence through obfuscation.” Drawing on first-hand accounts, municipal records, and public board meeting materials, she identifies four mechanisms surveillance companies use to smooth the path to procurement, and argues that this same process is an underused site for community resistance.

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Emily Cauble (UW Law), Phantom Tax Loopholes, 27 Fla. Tax Rev. 519 (2024)

Cauble surveyed 726 U.S. adults about their intuitions on federal income tax law, presenting scenarios where two transaction structures achieve the same non-tax outcome and asking respondents to guess whether the tax consequences would differ. The results show that many people hold form-driven intuitions, expecting that tax law contains “loopholes” even where it doesn’t. Cauble argues this points to a real cost of tax law’s complexity and its tendency to favor the well-advised: taxpayers may under-report income not out of willful evasion but because they misunderstand what the law actually requires.

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All papers are available for free download through the UW Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series. We invite you to explore the papers and to follow our faculty’s work on our website and on Bluesky.

This post was developed by the author with organizational and drafting assistance from Claude AI. All content was reviewed and refined for accuracy.