"Notably, the relationship exists for rulings finding noninfringement; judicial experience had no relationship to the likelihood a judge would find a patent invalid"
We changed the title to be that of the article. (The submitted title was 'Lemley: "more experienced judges are less likely to rule for the [patent owner]"'—which, to be fair, is an accurate quote from the abstract.)
Reading the title as it now provides interesting material for brief thought experiments. Since it isn't clear whether the judges tend to favor patent owners or those with new products and services that may infringe, one can imagine reactions to either finding. If the judges tend to favor the new/infringing products, then we can imagine a reaction affirming the judges' status as experts, and saying that the perspective from that status further proves how messed up the system is. Alternately, we can imagine that the judges are consistently finding in favor of patent holders, and begin winding up to deliver an explanation of how the problems of the system are exacerbated by judges who have little familiarity with the technology.
I could be wrong in imagining that the reactions are so malleable, but if they are it says to me that this type of survey treatment of the data is probably a worthless exercise in confirming biases. A bias toward believing there are too many patents issued for ideas that are not novel can be correct, while at the same time anything that confirms the same conclusions regardless of opposite findings is probably a waste of time. I could also be missing the point of the paper though.
