3 ms·

Doesn’t the appeals system make every case federal in theory, if not necessarily so in practice?

• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The patent system is federal law. It starts out in federal district court. That's the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas when the plaintiff "resides" there, which they do in order to get into that court. (The defendant also has to be subject to its jurisdiction, but that's generally true for companies that do business nationwide.) Ordinarily federal cases are appealed to the circuit court of appeals for that region, but patent cases everywhere are appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. If your first thought on hearing that there is a specific federal appeals court that gets all the patent cases was that it would be the target of regulatory capture by patent plaintiffs, you guessed right. After the circuit court, the next appeal would be to the US Supreme Court. But they don't take very many cases and for a long time they especially didn't take very many patent cases, so the other two captured courts have been screwing up the patent system for decades.