Administrative Revocation in Trademark Law

Although the use of administrative adjudication as a revocation mechanism U.S. intellectual property law has been well established in trademark law for over 60 years, it is patent law’s more recent, but more frequent, engagement with agency process that has influenced the IP-administrative interface. Much of that influence has borrowed tacitly from trademark practice, and proposals for remaining reform also look to trademark as a template. Now, the cycle is resuming, and theoretical and empirical work on administrative patent revocation offers lessons back to the trademark system for its own future reform. These lessons rest on the court-agency substitution thesis, which favors administrative process over judicial process in revoking vested IP rights primarily on the basis of agency expertise and access. This book chapter sketches out an agency for analytical, empirical, and normative exploration of court-agency substitution in trademark revocation