Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-712_87ad.pdf
Page Number: 27.0

6 

OIL STATES ENERGY SERVICES, LLC v. GREENE’S 
ENERGY GROUP, LLC 
GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

public access to new technologies that would not otherwise 
exist.  Mossoff, Rethinking Patents 1288–1289.  The Con-
stitution  itself  reflects  this  new  thinking,  authorizing  the 
issuance of patents precisely because of their contribution 
to  the  “Progress  of  Science  and  useful  Arts.”    Art.  I,  §8, 
cl. 8.  “In essence, there was a change in perception—from 
viewing a patent as a contract between the crown and the 
patentee  to  viewing  it  as  a  ‘social  contract’  between  the 
patentee  and  society.”    Waltersheid,  The  Early  Evolution 
of the United States Patent Law: Antecedents (Part 3), 77 
J.  Pat.  &  T.  Off.  Soc.  771,  793  (1995).    And  as  invention 
patents  came  to  be  seen  so  differently,  it  is  no  surprise 
courts came to treat them more solicitously.3 
  Unable  to  dispute  that  judges  alone  resolved  virtually 
all  patent  challenges  by  the  time  of  the  founding,  the 
Court  points  to  three  English  cases  that  represent  the 
Privy Council’s dying gasp in this area: Board of Ordnance 
v.  Wilkinson,  PC2/123  (1779);  Grill  [Grice]  v.  Waters, 
PC2/127 (1782); and Board of Ordnance v. Parr, PC1/3919 
(1810).4    Filed  in  1779,  1782,  and  1810,  each  involved  an 

—————— 

3 See also, e.g., Mossoff, Who Cares What Thomas Jefferson Thought 
About  Patents?  Reevaluating  the  Patent  “Privilege”  in  Historical 
Context, 92 Cornell L. Rev. 953, 967–968 (2007) (Mossoff, Reevaluating 
the  Patent  Privilege)  (“[A]n  American  patent  in  the  late  eighteenth 
century  was  radically  different  from  the  royal  monopoly  privilege 
dispensed by Queen Elizabeth or King James in the early seventeenth 
century.    Patents  no  longer  created,  and  sheltered  from  competition, 
manufacturing  monopolies—they  secured  the  exclusive  control  of  an 
inventor  over  his  novel  and  useful  scientific  or  mechanical  invention” 
(footnote  omitted));  Mossoff,  Rethinking  Patents  1286–1287;  H.  Fox, 
Monopolies  and  Patents:  A  Study  of  the  History  and  Future  of  the 
Patent Monopoly 4 (1947). 

4 The 1794 petition the Court invokes, ante, at 13, involved a Scottish 
patent.    Simpson  v.  Cunningham,  PC2/141,  p. 88  (1794).    The  English 
and  Scottish  patents  systems,  however,  were  distinct  and  enforced  by 
different regimes.  Gómez-Arostegui, Patent and Copyright Exhaustion 
in  England  Circa  1800,  pp. 10–16,  37,  49–50 
(Feb.  9,  2017), 
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905847.    Besides,  even  in  that  case  the