Certiorari, Universality, and a Patent Puzzle

63 Pages Posted: 29 Sep 2017 Last revised: 26 Jul 2018

See all articles by Tejas N. Narechania

Tejas N. Narechania

University of California, Berkeley, School of Law

Date Written: June 6, 2018

Abstract

The most important determinant of a case’s chances for Supreme Court review is a circuit split: If two Courts of Appeals have decided the same issue differently, review is substantially more likely. But practically every appeal in a patent case makes its way to a single court — the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. How, then, does the Supreme Court decide whether to grant certiorari in a patent case?

The petitions for certiorari in the Court’s patent docket suggest an answer: The Supreme Court looks for splits anyways. These splits, however, are of a different sort. Rather than consider whether two Courts of Appeals have decided the same issue differently, the Court looks to whether two fields of law conflict over the application of the same trans-substantive doctrine. Such “field splits” are an unusual candidate for Supreme Court attention. After all, the Court’s interest in circuit splits is motivated by a desire for geographic uniformity in federal law. But field splits, unlike circuit splits, do not give rise to forum shopping concerns, do not undermine the predictability of the law, nor otherwise implicate the legal values that counsel in favor of uniformity. Instead, the Supreme Court’s attention to field splits may suggest that legal universality — consistency across substantive fields of law — is an important (but unstated) priority in certiorari decision making.

The exercise of this universality interest through certiorari decisions in patent cases has several consequences for the Supreme Court’s agenda. The Court must better explain why field splits merit review, and we must better understand how to distinguish those field splits that implicate the Court’s universality-related concerns from those that do not.

Keywords: Supreme Court, Federal Circuit, Certiorari, Universality, Trans-Substantivity, Field Split, Uniformity, Circuit Split, Judicial Neutrality, Judicial Legitimacy, Judicial Efficiency, patent

Suggested Citation

Narechania, Tejas N., Certiorari, Universality, and a Patent Puzzle (June 6, 2018). 116 Michigan Law Review 1345 (2018), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3044035

Tejas N. Narechania (Contact Author)

University of California, Berkeley, School of Law ( email )

Berkeley, CA 94720-7200
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.tejasnarechania.net

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
232
Abstract Views
2,298
Rank
270,379
PlumX Metrics