There are three essential sources of uncertainty in the patent system: perceived uncertainty due to selective sampling (“statistical artefact uncertainty”), inherent uncertainty, and strategic uncertainty. It is only the strategic uncertainty source that should be of concern to reformers....

I agree with just about everything Jonathan Macey (2017) says in his symposium contribution. His claim that bureaucratic tendencies toward regularity—specifically, treating like cases alike—generate errors in categorization seems appropriate to me. His explanations of the pathologies in...