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Justices Rejected Record Number of Federal Circuit Patent Rulings

The Federal Circuit, which has exclusive appellate jurisdiction over patents, has made patent law more favorable to patentholders, leading to a surge in litigation, Vox's Timothy B. Lee reports. The U.S. Supreme Court has been scrutinizing the intermediate appellate court more frequently, reviewing a record six rulings last term, Lee further reports: "In a new essay, University of California, Hastings law professor Robin Feldman writes about the Supreme Court's increasingly blunt efforts to force the Federal Circuit to respect the high court's own precedents, which generally place stricter limits on patent rights ... In all of [six] cases [from last term], Feldman told me, "the Supreme Court soundly and unanimously rejected the Federal Circuit's logic." For example, the Supreme Court struck down a software patent in CLS Bank v. Alice.