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The Central Claiming Renaissance, Andres Sawicki

Cornell Law Review

The Supreme Court has recently reinvigorated the law of patentable subject matter. But beneath the headlines proclaiming the return of limits to patent eligibility, a more profound shift has taken place: central claiming is reborn.

The Court's eligibility cases are significant outliers compared to today's run-of-the-mill patent law because claim language plays little role in their analyses. In our modern peripheral claiming system, the claim language is the nearexclusive guide to the patent's boundaries. But in its earliest days, our patent system pursued a central claiming approach, in which the inventor's actual work determined the patent's scope. The Court's eligibility …