Posts Tagged: "Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite Laboratories"

Congress Initially Rebuffs SCOTUS Dominance of Patent Law, But Not for Long

The chaos created by this forum shopping was exacerbated by differing views of what in these rulings by SCOTUS was holding, and what was simply dicta.  Together with the enactment of Bayh-Dole (which sought to alleviate the prior dismal record of commercialization of federally-sponsored research where the federal government retained the patent rights), Congress created the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as the successor to the CCPA, as well as to supplant all other circuit courts as the arbiter of patent law jurisprudence, effective as of 1980.  Creation of the Federal Circuit was also at least an implicit (and more likely, explicit) warning to SCOTUS to tread carefully on patent law jurisprudence and to let the Federal Circuit do the heavy lifting without significant interference or meddling from the highest court in the land. For almost two decades, SCOTUS seemed to heed that warning, rarely interfering with Federal Circuit precedent… But beginning with the eBay case in 2006, SCOTUS started an almost relentless series of rulings which meddle with, chastise, and overturn longstanding Federal Circuit precedent, often using the rubric that the Federal Circuit’s ruling/precedent was “too rigid,” or “too inflexible.”