Supreme Court of the United States
The US Supreme Court is the highest court in the USA.
Contents
Some important cases
Cases treating the most important topic, patentable subject matter:
| Year | Case | Author | Context | Ruling | Hearing | Briefs | Wikipedia |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Alice v. CLS Bank | Thomas | overview CLS | ruling | transcript | Briefs | Wikipedia |
| 2013 | Molecular v. Myriad | overview Myriad | ruling | transcript | - | Wikipedia | |
| 2012 | Mayo v. Prometheus | Breyer | overview Mayo | ruling | transcript | - | Wikipedia |
| 2009 | Bilski v. Kappos | Kennedy | overview Bilski | ruling | transcript | Briefs | Wikipedia |
| 1981 | Diamond v. Diehr | overview Diehr | ruling | [ transcript] | - | Wikipedia | |
| 1978 | Parker v. Flook | overview Flook | ruling | [ transcript] | - | Wikipedia | |
| 1972 | Gottschalk v. Benson | overview Benson | ruling | [ transcript] | - | Wikipedia |
For a complete list of pages on this wiki on the Court's rulings see:
The judges
The current judges are (as of July 2012):
- Chief Justice Roberts
- Justice Alito
- Justice Breyer
- Justice Ginsburg
- Justice Kagan
- Justice Kennedy
- Justice Scalia
- Justice Sotomayor
- Justice Thomas
Crude analyses coservative-liberal
Some suggest that conservative judges are more pro-swpat than the liberals.[1] This theory is very crude (and in light of Thomas's opinion in Alice v. CLS Bank seems to be disproven), but for what it's worth, one metric classifies the judges in a spectrum based on how conservative or liberal they are, with the four conservative judges slightly spread out, then Kennedy, then the four liberal judges bunched together with very similar scores:[2][3]
- Thomas
- Scalia
- Alito
- Roberts
- Kennedy
- Breyer
- Kagan
- Sotomayer
- Ginsburg
Noteworthy ex-judges
- Justice Stevens was on the court from 1975 to 2010 and wrote opinions for cases including Parker v. Flook (1978, USA), Diamond v. Diehr (1981, USA), and Bilski v. Kappos (2010, USA).
Suitability for deciding policy questions
Former Chief Judge of the CAFC, Paul Redmond Michel had this to say about the Supreme Court's suitability for interpreting article 101 of the US Code which defines patentable subject matter:[4]
Take Bilski on 101. Nine Supreme Court justices, eight of them had never seen a 101 issue before in their entire time on the Supreme Court. Only Justice Stevens had ever seen a 101 issue before. Well, that shows the problem right there. The Federal Circuit has every issue under the sun come up again and again and again, month after month, year after year. So it has intense exposure to all these different issues and the interplay among all these different sections, and the Supreme Court doesn’t. And, frankly, I think the Supreme Court has often been misled by lawyers. For example, in eBay the Supreme Court was told that we had an “automatic” injunction rule, which was never the case. It was just absolutely false. In the KSR they were told that we had a “rigid” rule that didn’t allow any judgment, which was never the case. So in addition to their inexperience and unfamiliarity with patent law, they’re subject to being manipulated and misinformed by overstated claims by some advocates and they aren’t maybe as well equipped as Federal Circuit judges might be to know that the claim is baloney
Of course, the problems of the CAFC can be seen in cases like CLS Bank v. Alice (2012, USA), where the CAFC was so splintered that there was finally no majority opinion other than a single line saying they reject the patent.
Checking for new opinions
If there's an interesting case, the front page of http://www.supremecourtus.gov/ shows the court's calendar. Opinions are usually published on Non-argument Days. Sometimes opinions are published the day after a non-argument day, especially if there are a lot of opinions to publish. The opinions are published at around 10am local time and are put immediately on-line here:
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- Case law in the USA
- USA patents courts and appeals
- US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit - the Federal court that hears patent appeals, below the Supreme Court
- How to submit an amicus brief in the USA
- Category:Court rulings by US Supreme Court
External links
References
- ↑ "Supreme Court skeptical of computer-based patents". http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/31/supreme-court-patent-software-business/7112959/. "The court's conservative justices were more supportive of the patent. Justice Antonin Scalia wondered why implementing an abstract idea on a computer wasn't enough to justify patent protection."
- ↑ http://mqscores.wustl.edu/measures.php
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graph_of_Martin-Quinn_Scores_of_Supreme_Court_Justices_1937-Now.png
- ↑ http://ipwatchdog.com/2010/10/24/chief-judge-michel-interview-sequel-part-2/
