The intersection of antitrust law and intellectual property ("IP") is a niche that did not command national attention during the lead-up to the election. But evidence exists about President Obama’s general views on antitrust law and on patent reform.

By the year 2025, the breadth of the per se rule will narrow yet again and federal courts will evaluate tying arrangements under the rule of reason. Christopher Leslie (Univ. of California Irvine School of Law)

In this paper, we show that there are important differences across patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We show that more experienced examiners cite less prior art, are more likely to grant patents, and are more likely to grant patents without any rejections. These results...

Patent law both imposes a duty on patent applicants to submit relevant prior art to the PTO and assumes that examiners use this information to determine an application's patentability. In this paper, we examine the validity of these assumptions by studying the use made of applicant-submitted...

Economists often assume that a patent gives its owner a well-defined legal right to exclude others from practicing the invention described in the patent. In practice, however, the rights afforded to patent holders are highly uncertain. Under patent law, a patent is no guarantee of exclusion but...

Executive SummaryHow can we allow patent examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? This essay reviews the recent literature and considers a number of proposals and their limitations. It...