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Full-Text Articles in Law
Domesticating Guidance, Peter L. Strauss
Domesticating Guidance, Peter L. Strauss
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay, written for an occasion celebrating the scholarship of Professor William Funk of Lewis & Clark Law School, builds in good part on his analyses of soft law documents — statements of general policy and interpretive rules — that today one generally finds discussed under the rubric “guidance.” These are agency texts of less formality than hard law regulations adopted under the procedures of 5 U.S.C. § 553, that inform the public how an agency intends to administer its responsibilities, as a matter of policy or (what may seem just one instance of that) via the interpretation of its …
Can A Court Change The Law By Saying Nothing?, Paul Gugliuzza, Mark A. Lemley
Can A Court Change The Law By Saying Nothing?, Paul Gugliuzza, Mark A. Lemley
Faculty Scholarship
Can an appellate court alter substantive law without writing an opinion? We attempt to answer that question by conducting a novel empirical investigation into how the Federal Circuit has implemented the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank, the most recent in a series of Supreme Court decisions strengthening patent law’s patentable subject matter requirement. Our dataset includes each one of the Federal Circuit’s more than 100 decisions on patentable subject matter in the three years since Alice, including affirmances issued without an opinion under Federal Circuit Rule 36.
Including those no-opinion affirmances, the Federal Circuit has found …