Gugliuzza: How far will the Federal Circuit go?

Does the Federal Circuit really ignore patent policy, as many of the court's judges have claimed?  In The Federal Circuit as a Federal Court, 54 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1791 (2013), Paul R. Gugliuzza describes the Federal Circuit's tendency for self-aggrandizement in its relationships with state courts, the PTO, district courts, and regional circuits.  In each of these relationships, Gugliuzza argues, the Federal Circuit has consolidated power by the citing objectives of uniformity and expert adjudication in patent law.

Nofal on the JPML & the Federal Circuit

The Federal Circuit should be given exclusive appellate jurisdiction over suits consolidated by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML), according to Chris Nofal's How the JPML Can Benefit from the Federal Circuit and Vice-Versa (recently published in IDEA). As regular blog readers know, I love featuring the work of new scholars, so I was pleased to see that Nofal just graduated from Northwestern Law last year (so he must have written this article while still a student). He is also a former patent examiner (his background is computer engineering) and current Covington associate. Nofal argues that both the JPML and the Federal Circuit have promoted "macro-level judicial economy" at the expense of "the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding," and that giving the Federal Circuit exclusive jurisdiction over JPML suits could help solve these problems. Nofal’s overarching aim is “to remedy procedures with an eye toward correcting outcomes.”

Gunn v. Minton Argument Preview

The Supreme Court hears argument Wednesday in Gunn v. Minton, concerning whether federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over state law malpractice claims where the underlying question involves patent law. This case has attracted far less attention than the other patent cases this Term, but it raises an important federal jurisdiction question, and the Court's opinion could have implications far outside patent malpractice cases—especially because the Court has held that the patent-related statute at issue, 28 U.S.C. § 1338(a) (giving the federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over "any civil action arising under any Act of Congress relating to patents"), should be interpreted in the same way as § 1331 (the source of federal question jurisdiction for actions "arising under" federal laws).

Gugliuzza Debate: Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction

This blog recently featured an impressive and provocative article by Paul Gugliuzza titled Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction (original post) addressing what many scholars consider the "patent crisis." Now thirty years since its creation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has in recent years increasingly become the subject of heated contention and widespread criticism within the intellectual property community. Since appearing in the June 2012 edition, the proposals set forth by Professor Gugliuzza to reconfigure the Federal Circuit's jurisdiction have triggered a debate at the Georgetown Law Journal. Two engaging response comments have been submitted, followed by a reply from Professor Gugliuzza. The remainder of this post highlights the key aspects of this debate.

Paul R. Gugliuzza—Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction

Does the Federal Circuit’s non-patent caseload impact the development of its patent jurisprudence? In Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction, 100 Geo. L.J. 1437 (2012), Professor Paul R. Gugliuzza (University of Florida Levin College of Law) argues that the Federal Circuit’s non-patent docket might underexpose the court to relevant issues impacting innovation policy and that the court’s concentrated patent docket may marginalize some of its non-patent cases. Professor Gugliuzza concludes by proposing a framework for a reimagined Federal Circuit docket that would rectify these problems.

Patent Law, State Law, and Abraxis v. Navinta

I am studying for my federal jurisdiction exam, so I have been thinking about how patent law fits into the themes of this course. We used the classic casebook, Hart and Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System, and one of the themes emphasized by the book is the interstitial nature of federal law. From p. 459:

Federal law is generally interstitial in its nature. It rarely occupies a legal field completely, totally excluding all participation by the legal systems of the states. . . . It builds upon legal relationships established by the states, altering or supplanting them only so far as necessary . . . . Congress acts, in short, against the background of the total corpus juris of the states in much the way that a state legislature acts against the background of the common law, assumed to govern unless changed by legislation.

One might think that patent law is entirely federal, but Professor Amar (who has also reviewed an earlier edition of the casebook) liked to remind us that federal law is never in a vacuum.