Posts Tagged: "Elgin v. Department of th Treasury"

In 2019, the issue of preservation of constitutional arguments before the USPTO, which had basically been dormant for a decade, was abruptly and dramatically revived. Now the subject of whether constitutional arguments generally ought to be preserved before the agency is settled, at least for the time being. Constitutional arguments should ordinarily be preserved before the agency; otherwise those constitutional arguments might be summarily deemed forfeited on appeal.

Those who practice in the field of patents tend to focus almost exclusively upon developments in patent law and pay less attention to developments in other areas of law. This is to be expected; patent cases don’t usually overlap with issues such as employment law or criminal law; so why bother reading up on those subjects? And yet, it can actually be useful to keep abreast of Supreme Court decisions that on their faces do not pertain to patent law. A few days ago, IPWatchdog Founder and CEO Gene Quinn discussed one such case. Though that case was not patent-related, he felt the decision may be of interest to patent practitioners, especially those dealing with patent eligibility under section 101. In that same vein, following is a discussion of a (less recent) decision from the United States Supreme Court, Elgin v. Department of the Treasury, 567 U.S. 1 (2012), that patent practitioners may have overlooked. On its face, the case deals with employment law, but it includes aspects of federal administrative practice that can affect patent practitioners.