Source: http://samhenderson.net/us-patent-law/how-many-patent-law-decisions-has-the-us-supreme-court-issued/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 06:37:38+00:00

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Reading and writing about the Alice decision and its fallout got me wondering: how many patent decisions has the Supreme Court issued altogether?
Like most “simple” questions, it turns out that this one doesn’t have a very straightforward answer. But the number is somewhere in the 600-900 range.
Inspired by the “breakfast experiments” over on Language Log, I set out to answer the question. But by the time I was done crunching the data, this ended up being more of a breakfast, lunch, and dinner experiment.
This yielded 794 results in WestlawNext, 742 in Lexis Advance, and 741 in Bloomberg.
However, chewing through the results with Python showed that the Bloomberg results contained several duplicates, and the number of unique cases there was actually 734.
Overall, the total number of cases that are on at least one of the three lists is 870; the total number of cases that are present on all three lists is 602.
From spot checking these cases, I think the “true” number of Supreme Court patent decisions is probably closer to the high end of this range: even when only one of the big three includes a case, that case is usually pretty solidly relevant to patent law.
First page of Tyler v. Tuel.
Westlaw lists 25 cases that the others omit, such as Philip v. Nock (1871) (dealing with “arising-under” jurisdiction for patent suits). On the other hand, it omits 27 cases that the others include; these include the 1915 case of Healy v. Sea Gull Specialty Co. (likewise dealing with a jurisdictional question, specifically whether the presence of contract issues in a patent case would eliminate arising-under jurisdiction).
Lexis lists 37 cases that the others omit, such as Cleveland v. United States (2000) (mentioning patents only in connection with an analogy that the government offered and the court rejected). It omits 90 cases that the others include; notable among these is the very first Supreme Court patent case, Tyler v. Tuel (1810) (holding that a partial assignee does not have standing to bring an infringement suit).
Bloomberg lists 14 cases that the others omit; these include Maytag Co. v. Hurley Machine Co. (1939) (holding a patent invalid for failure to disclaim). It omits 74 cases that the others include, such as the infamous 2012 case of Golan v. Holder (discussing patent caselaw in connection with the question of whether works can be removed from the public domain).

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