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...

Rapid advances in digital and life sciences technology continue to spur the evolution of intellectual property law. As professors and practitioners in this field know all too well, Congress and the courts continue to develop intellectual property law and jurisprudence at a rapid pace. For that...

The Federal Circuit is ignoring a significant share of the words of patent claims. That's a bad idea as a matter of policy. It is virtually impossible to tell when the court is going to do it. And it's inconsistent with the idea that the claims define the scope of the invention, and with how the...

Software companies, and startups in particular, rely on interoperability to build new and innovative products. Without it, developers would be at the mercy of proprietary platforms written in specific, rapidly obsolete computer languages and without the ability to create new and innovative...

Since 1995, patents in the United States expire twenty years from the day they were filed. Except when they don’t. Beginning in 2000, Congress provided certain “exceptions” to the twenty-year patent term, extending the life of patents to compensate for excessive delays in patent...

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) increase their influence over society, policymakers are increasingly regulating them. But to regulate these technologies, we first need to know what they are. And here we come to a problem. No one has been able to offer a decent definition of robots and...

Trademark owners regularly overreach. They often threaten or sue people they have no business suing, including satirists, parodists, non-commercial users, and gripe sites. When they do, they often justify their aggressive legal conduct by pointing to the need to protect their trademarks by...

Rapid advances in digital and life sciences technology continue to spur the evolution of intellectual property law. As professors and practitioners in this field know all too well, Congress and the courts continue to develop intellectual property law and jurisprudence at a rapid pace. For that...