Posts Tagged: "Postal Service"

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service in which the 6-3 majority held that the U.S. government doesn’t qualify as a “person” for the purposes of petitioning the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to institute patent validity proceedings under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA). The majority opinion, penned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, followed Court precedent supporting the presumption that the government isn’t a “person,” while finding the Postal Service’s arguments to the contrary to be unpersuasive. Justice Stephen Breyer penned a dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, in which he found that Congress intended to include the government as a “person” when passing the AIA.