Lasting Impact: Why You Should Care About Court of Customs and Patent Appeal Cases

Lasting Impact: Why You Should Care About Court of Customs and Patent Appeal Cases

Journal article

1 online resource

Powerful caselaw sits within easy reach of practitioners, but most do not use, and many do not even know about it. The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (“CCPA”), which always sat en banc and was the predecessor to today's Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“CAFC”), developed a rich body of jurisprudence relating to U.S. patent law. The CAFC adopted all CCPA holdings as binding precedent in its very first decision, South Corp. v. United States: "The court sits in banc to consider what case law, if any, may appropriately serve as established precedent. We hold that the holdings of our predecessor courts, the United States Court of Claims and the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals [CCPA], announced by those courts before the close of business September 30, 1982, shall be binding as precedent in this court." Overturning CCPA holdings should, therefore, require either an en banc decision by the Federal Circuit, as indicated in South Corp., or a decision by the CCPA overruling the precedent. The Federal Circuit has rarely explicitly overturned CCPA precedent in the forty years of its existence.2 One would thus conclude that nearly all CCPA authority remains as en banc precedent in the Federal Circuit.

Crossref

AIPLA Quarterly Journal, Winter 2023, Volume 51, Issue 1, p. 39.

[New York, NY] : Thomson Reuters, 2024.

English

https://1.next.westlaw.com/Copyright

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