Patent Puzzles after the Supreme Court’s 2024 Administrative Law Cases: Stare Decisis, Rulemaking, and Discretion
Patent – Patently-O 2024-07-24
Summary:
Guest post by Arti K. Rai, Elvin R. Latty Distinguished Professor of Law and Co-Director, Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law
In a flurry of recent decisions, the Supreme Court has continued its skepticism of administrative agencies. Although these decisions may not have as significant an impact in patent law as in other areas, they do pose interesting puzzles with respect to stare decisis as well as agency rulemaking and discretion that will provide many litigation opportunities going forward.
Consider first stare decisis and the Court’s overruling of Chevron deference (i.e. deference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes) in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. While the Loper Bright Court said that principles of “statutory stare decisis” meant its decision did not “call into question” holdings of cases that applied Chevron to find “specific agency actions” lawful, the Court did not discuss in any detail what “specific agency action” means.
Notably, the 2016 patent law case of Cuozzo v. Lee was the last case in which the Court itself found an agency action reasonable, and therefore lawful, under Chevron.