The final group of amicus briefs were filed this past week in Oil States v. Greene’s Energy — This round supporting the Government’s position that Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings are consistent with the US Constitution.

As per usual, the briefs are largely divisible into two categories: (1) direct merits arguments focusing on congressional power to enact the IPR regime; and (2) policy briefs arguing that IPRs do important work.  I’ll note here that the focus of the policy briefs is on efficient and timely adjudication. I have not seen any of the briefs so far that recognize the third reality – that the PTAB is invaliding patents that would have been upheld by a court.  For some reason amicus consider it appropriate to identify court failures in efficiency but not to identify failures in the substantive decisionmaking.  The closest on-point is likely Apple’s Brief which promotes the “well-informed and correct” outcomes of the PTAB. 16-712bsacAppleInc.

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A second key brief in the set was filed by a group of law professors led by Professors Lemley (Stanford); Reilly (Kent); and Rai (Duke).  The group makes the argument that – as a creature of congressional statute rather than common or natural law – congress also has the full power to establish a system for revocation. 16-712, BSAC 72 Professors of Intellectual Property Law.  The idea behind these statements is to step around the Supreme Court’s Stern decision that expresses “skepticism about Congressional efforts to withdraw from Article III courts ‘any matter which, from its nature, is the subject of a suit at the common law, or in equity, or admiralty’ or ‘is made of the stuff of the traditional actions at common law tried by the courts at Westminster in 1789.’”  The law professor’s interpretation of these cases though is that rights whose source is statute (rather than common or natural law) can largely be further determined by Congress.  This argument skirts around prior discussions that have focused on the reality that patent cases were “law tried by the courts at Westminster in 1789.”