Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-712_87ad.pdf
Page Number: 32

Cite as:  584 U. S. ____ (2018) 

11 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

the law long afforded patent holders more protection than 
that  against  the  threat  of  governmental  intrusion  and 
dispossession.    The law requires us to honor those histori-
cal rights, not diminish them. 
  Still,  the  Court  asks  us  to  look  away  in  yet  another 
direction.  At the founding, the Court notes, the Executive 
could  sometimes  both  dispense  and  revoke  public  fran-
chises.    And  because,  it  says,  invention  patents  are  a 
species  of  public  franchises,  the  Court  argues  the  Execu-
tive  should  be  allowed  to  dispense  and  revoke  them  too.  
Ante, at 9–10.   But  labels  aside,  by  the  time  of  the  found-
ing the law treated patents protected by the Patent Clause 
quite  differently  from  ordinary  public  franchises.    Many 
public  franchises  amounted  to  little  more  than  favors 
resembling  the  original  royal  patents  the  framers  expressly 
refused to protect in the Patent Clause.  The Court points 
to  a  good  example:  the  state-granted  exclusive  right  to 
operate a toll bridge.  Ante, at 9.  By the founding, courts 
in this country (as in England) had come to view anticom-
petitive  monopolies  like  that  with  disfavor,  narrowly 
construing  the  rights  they  conferred.    See  Proprietors  of 
Charles  River  Bridge  v.  Proprietors  of  Warren  Bridge,  11 
Pet. 420, 544 (1837).  By contrast, courts routinely applied 
to  invention  patents  protected  by  the  Patent  Clause  the 
“liberal  common  sense  construction”  that  applies  to  other 
instruments  creating  private  property  rights,  like  land 
deeds.  Davis v. Palmer, 7 F. Cas. 154, 158 (No. 3,645) (CC 
Va. 1827) (Marshall, C. J.); see also Mossoff, Reevaluating 
the  Patent  Privilege  990  (listing  more  differences  in 
treatment).  As Justice Story explained, invention patents 
protected by the Patent Clause were “not to be treated as 
mere monopolies odious in the eyes of the law, and there-
fore  not  to  be  favored.”    Ames  v.  Howard,  1  F.  Cas.  755, 
756  (No.  326)  (CC  Mass.  1833).    For  precisely  these  rea-
sons  and  as  we’ve seen,  the  law traditionally  treated  pat- 
ents issued under the Patent Clause very differently than