John Golden: Is the USPTO Entitled to Chevron Deference?

This is a guest post by Ben Picozzi, a J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School.

Is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) entitled to Chevron deference? Does this matter? Many commentators believe that courts’ failure to grant Chevron deference to the PTO’s interpretations of substantive patent law renders it powerless as a policymaking institution. As previously discussed on this blog, Arti Rai and Melissa Wasserman have argued that the America Invents Act (AIA) changes this by granting adjudicatory or rulemaking authority to the PTO over substantive questions of patent law, including the standards of patentability, and consequently interpretive authority.

Top 31 IP scholars by h-index

Scholarometer is a citation-analysis tool developed by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington. It mines Google Scholar data to generate a scholar's h-index: the maximum number of articles h such that each has received at least h citations. (It also computes the h_s-index, which normalizes an h-index by the discipline average, which is 14.8 for law.)