With this case, the Supreme Court continues its trend of gradually scaling back on the idea that patents can be freely and loosely granted to such a bilious degree that the very idea of what a legitimate patent is supposed to do (promote the progress of science and useful arts) is undercut.

This one does not involve the question of patentable subject matter but instead a question of process: in layman's terms, if Congress has set up a relatively quick and painless process by which junk patents can be sent packing without the pain, turmoil, and delays of going to court, can this process be shot down as being unconstitutional because patent validity, "from its nature," must be decided by a court? In answering this question no, the Court upheld the power of Congress to better police junk patents and rid the world of them with dispatch.

In short, this decision upholds the lawfulness of the process known as inter partes review, by which the PTO can reconsider and reverse the validity of dubious patents that it previously had granted.

Score this as a victory for those who support patents but who do not want the currency cheapened, so to speak, by junky ones that only serve to undercut what a legitimate patent even means.

The legal reasoning here (both in the majority and the dissent) is refined, principled, and arcane, dealing with the nature of a patent right, how it evolved under English law through the 18th century, and what this meant for the definition of the judicial power under Article III of the
U.S. Constitution when it was adopted in 1789 (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-712_87ad.pdf).

All justices agreed (as the Constitution says) that the federal judicial power vests exclusively in the Supreme Court and the federal courts as established by Congress and that, if inter partes review is an exercise of such federal judicial power, it is unconstitutional.

In deciding that this sort of review is not an exercise of federal judicial power, the majority held that the grant of a patent is a "public franchise" that essentially can be determined in the reasonable discretion of the granting authority (the government) without need of a judicial determination. So, just as Congress (legislative) set up the PTO (executive) to grant or deny patents based on criteria defined by Congress via statutes (legislative), Congress could also set up procedures (inter partes review) based on criteria that it defined (invalidity if patent failed novelty and non-obviousness tests in light of prior art) by which the same executive branch (PTO) can reconsider and invalidate the previously granted patent. Yes, Article III vests the exclusive judicial power of the United States in the Supreme Court and in the inferior courts established by Congress but inter partes review is not a judicial power given that a patent is a public franchise that can be shaped and altered by the government without regard to the courts. In dissent, Gorsuch argued that a patent grant is not a public franchise but a vested private property interest that could be abrogated under the U.S. Constitution only by an exercise of judicial power and not by the PTO acting extra-judicially.

Both the majority and the dissent are basically originalist justices and so the disagreement between them is, I think, not as large as may appear. For the majority, Justice Thomas went out of his way to emphasize how exceedingly narrow his holding was (ruling does not involve infringement claim, is tied to the idea that there is ultimate judicial review after the process is complete, does not address any constitutional challenge such as retroactive application not raised by the party filing the appeal). Based on this, I would suspect that, in other contexts, these justices would all agree that patents do involve significant elements of private-property protection. But, for this case, and in upholding a hugely helpful procedure for ridding the world of junk patents, the majority was willing to say, in effect, "nothing at all wrong with that, have at it." The decision is a correct one and continues a welcome trend toward reestablishing sanity in the patent world.