In 1858, the United States Attorney General issued an opinion, Invention of a Slave, declaring inventions by African Americans, enslaved and free, unpatentable. Within a few years, legal changes that abolished the law of slavery rendered the opinion obsolete, and it became forgotten, dropped from legal memory. Combining history and Critical Race Theory, this Essay repositions the opinion as a remembered legal story and argues that law’s selective...
Patent Law
Patent law tries to spur the development of new and better innovative technology. But it focuses much more on “new” than “better”—and it turns out that “new” carries real social costs. I argue that patent law promotes innovation that diverges from existing technology, either a little (what I call “differentiating innovation”) or a lot (“exploring innovation”), at the expense of innovation that tells us more about existing...
Diagnostic tests are often patented using broad method claims, which allow inventors to secure the greatest possible protection for their inventions. However, several recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit cases invalidated broad diagnostic method claims under 35 U.S.C. § 101, holding that the claims were directed to unpatentable abstract ideas, natural laws, or natural phenomena. In light of these decisions, the continued...
In 2011, Congress created a new administrative pathway through which a party can challenge the validity of a granted patent: inter partes review (IPR). Like preexisting reexamination procedures, IPR is a mechanism through which a private party may ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to invalidate or narrow patents that fail to meet the standards of patent eligibility, thus returning subject matter to the public domain and protecting...
Introduction Pressure is building again for Congress to reform patent law. Various proposals would reduce patent-litigation costs through fee shifting, delaying discovery, or allowing manufacturers to defend suits on behalf of their customers. Eluding consideration, however, is one simple change that might eliminate millions or even billions of dollars worth of waste across the entire […]