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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Porous Court-Agency Border In Patent Law, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
The Porous Court-Agency Border In Patent Law, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
The progression toward reevaluating patent validity in the administrative, rather than judicial, setting became overtly substitutionary in the America Invents Act. No longer content to encourage court litigants to rely on Patent Office expertise for faster, cheaper, and more accurate validity decisions, Congress in the AIA took steps to force a choice. The result is an emergent border between court and agency power in the U.S. patent system. By design, the border is not absolute. Concurrent activity in both settings over the same dispute remains possible. What is troubling is the systematic weakening of this border by Patent Office encroachments …
When Can The Patent Office Intervene In Its Own Cases?, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
When Can The Patent Office Intervene In Its Own Cases?, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
The rise of administrative patent validity review since the America Invents Act has rested on an enormous expansion of Patent Office authority. A relatively little-known aspect of that authority is the agency's statutory ability to intervene in Federal Circuit appeals from adversarial proceedings in its own Patent Trial and Appeal Board. The Patent Office has exercised this intervenor authority frequently and with specific apparent policy objectives, including where one of the adverse parties did not participate in the appeal. Moreover, until recently, there has been no constitutional inquiry into the Article III standing that the Patent Office must establish in …