On the Development of Patent Law

Abstract:     
There is little dispute over what Congress believed it was doing to patent law when it established the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Centralizing appellate jurisdiction for patent law was meant to address the widespread perception that the legal infrastructure of patent law was not well managed by the conventional arrangement of regional circuits supervised by the U.S. Supreme Court. The new court, it was thought, would better manage and develop patent law, thereby producing improvements in the uniformity and coherency of the law. This Article examines central features of patent law that the Federal Circuit is conventionally credited with developing – specifically, doctrines of patentability and patent scope – against the background of the court’s institutional position in the patent system. From that perspective, the Article explains how the Federal Circuit, while perhaps not perfectly, has moved to rationalize patent law with patent policy and theory.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 53

Keywords: Federal Circuit, Law and Courts, Federal Courts, National Circuit Court, Doctrinal Development, Judicial Decisionmaking, Patent Law, Obvious, Obviousness, Claim Construction, Equivalents, Subject Matter Courts, Specialized Courts, Phillips v. AWH Corp

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