Supreme Court Ruling Encourages Early Filing of Applications to Register Copyrights [Patent Reviews]

Supreme Court ruling broadens BRCA testing options.

T he day after Mother's Day, actress Angelina Jolie wrote an op-ed in the New York Times revealing her decision to undergo a double mastectomy after learning that she carries a deleterious mutation in the BRCA1 gene. Jolie and women like her who have certain germ-line BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations are at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancers. Jolie, whose mother died from ovarian cancer, said s...

Supreme Court reaffirms landmark informed-consent ruling in chickenpox case.

In June the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a British Columbia family physician had adequately discharged her duty to disclose even though she failed to tell her patient of a serious but very small increased risk to her fetus posed by a case of chickenpox. The patient, Carole Arndt, gave birth in 1986 to a daughter who was diagnosed with congenital varicella syndrome. She requires feeding th...

How Much Has the Supreme Court Changed Patent Law

How Can the Supreme Court Not “Understand” Patent Law?

The Supreme Court does understand patent law. This invited Essay responds to Federal Circuit Judge Dyk’s remarks at the Chicago-Kent Supreme Court IP Review, in particular, his observation that the patent “bar and the academy have expressed skepticism that the Supreme Court understands patent law well enough to make the governing rules” (a view Judge Dyk did not endorse). The idea that the Supr...

Supreme Court

Th ere is no doubt that the U.S. Supreme Court has in-fl uenced the politics of the country. As a public body, the Court is a highly visible part of the federal government. Th is has always been so, even when the justices met briefl y twice a year in the drafty basement of the Capitol. Yet the idea that the Court itself is a political institution is controversial. Th e justices themselves have ...