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Judge Diane Wood’s SCIPR Address Featured in Wall Street Journal

Chicago-Kent’s annual Supreme Court IP Review is a leading conference designed to provide intellectual property practitioners, jurists, academics, and law students with a comprehensive review of the U.S. Supreme Court’s IP cases. The conference focuses on the IP cases from the U.S. Supreme Court’s previous Term, the cases on the docket for the upcoming Term, and a handful of IP cert. petitions to watch.

The Honorable Diane Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit delivered the keynote address at SCIPR 2013. Her speech sparked an ongoing national debate over ending the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction in patent cases, most recently in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Critics Fault Court’s Grip on Appeals for Patents.” Here is an excerpt:

Calls to loosen the court’s hold on patent law are growing amid complaints that the court, through its rulings, have made certain areas of patent law hard for lawyers and lower courts to follow. Allowing other appellate courts around the country to weigh in on patent issues might help sharpen the law, say critics.

“The judges on the Federal Circuit are as capable as any in the country, but we’d be better off having a diversity of [judicial] viewpoints on patent law the way we do with nearly every other legal subject,” said Diane Wood, the chief judge of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.

In a speech last fall, Chief Judge Wood publicly advocated abolishing the Federal Circuit’s “exclusive jurisdiction” over most patent appeals, in favor of letting the other federal appeals courts hear patent cases as well.

Previously, Judge Wood’s address received attention in a Washington Post article titled “The Dixie Chicks and Robin Thicke explain how to fix the patent system.”

View Judge Wood’s address below or on YouTube and visit the SCIPR website for more information on the conference.

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