By Rachel Sachs On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s judgment of invalidity of several claims in Sequenom’s diagnostic method patent on the grounds that they were not directed to patent-eligible subject matter under the relevant section of the Patent Act, 35 U.S.C. § 101. The case, Ariosa…
By Rachel Sachs On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Commil USA, LLC v. Cisco Systems, Inc., in which it held that a defendant’s belief that a patent is invalid is not a defense to induced infringement of that patent under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b). Four years ago, in a case called Global-Tech,…
This new post by Claire Laporte of Foley Hoag LLP appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015. Do patents nurture or stifle innovation? In a recent series of decisions, the Supreme Court has begun to…
This new post by I. Glenn Cohen appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015. The relationship between medicine and capital punishment has been a persistent feature of this past year in health law, both…
By Abby Moncrieff And the storm rolls on… Ilya Somin has now responded to my response to him, and he correctly notes that I failed to confront his core point. (I was more focused on responding to Rick Hills and Jon Adler.) Ilya’s beef with the application of the anti-coercion argument (via the avoidance canon)…
By Rachel Sachs Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, and the Justices seemed split on the central issue of whether the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permits health insurance subsidies to flow to citizens of states that have chosen not to establish their own insurance exchanges. Trying to predict the outcome…
By Dov Fox The U.S. tax court has just issued its long-awaited decision in Perez v. Commissioner, 144 T.C. No. 4 (Jan. 22, 2015). (Hat tip to Richard Carpenter, who represented Perez.) The case decided whether the $20,000 a woman called Nichelle Perez received to provide her eggs is, for IRS purposes, taxable income, or, instead, recovery for physical damages, which would make that…
By Nicolas Terry Today, the Washington Post ran an interview with Laurence Tribe about the King v. Burwell subsidy litigation (recall that oral arguments are scheduled for March 4). Tribe speculated that Chief Justice Roberts will once again be the swing vote, as he was in Nat’l Fed. of Independent Bus. v. Sebelius. Tribe seems to predict…
By Joan H. Krause[Cross-posted at HealthLawProf Blog] In a prior post, I discussed the Seventh Circuit’s decision in United States v. Nayak, one of the first major “honest services” mail and wire fraud cases to arise since the Supreme Court decidedSkilling v. United States in 2010. In Skilling, the Court found clear Congressional intent to limit honest services prosecutions to “offenders who, in violation…
By Joan H. Krause[Cross-posted at HealthLawProf Blog] Since the early 1900’s, the federal mail and wire fraud statutes have been applied to schemes to defraud victims not just of money or property, but also of “intangible rights” such as the right to the “honest services” of an employee or public servant. 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343, 1346.…
