Patent law is traditionally territorial in scope. With recent additions to the Patent Act, Congress, however, has taken action to expand the effective territorial scope of U.S. patents. Moreover, courts, in interpreting this recent legislation, have exhibited a willingness to expand further the reach of U.S. patent law. Concurrent with Congress’s and the judiciary’s struggle to resolve these questions regarding the territoriality of U.S. patents, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently faced the question of whether U.S. courts should adjudicate claims based on foreign patents. The reluctance of U.S. courts to adjudicate foreign patent claims is inconsistent with recent decisions that seek to stretch U.S. patent law even further and with foreign courts that have adjudicated foreign patent claims. Given that an increasing number of entities hold patents on the same inventions in multiple jurisdictions, multinational patent litigation inevitably will continue to be a crucial issue in international patent law. This Note fills a gap in the academic literature by undertaking an examination of both extraterritorial patent enforcement and multinational patent litigation. This Note brings together divergent strands of research by examining both extraterritorial patent enforcement and multinational patent litigation. Ultimately, this Note suggests that courts should consider enforcing foreign patents in certain situations instead of trying to apply U.S. patents extraterritorially.
Note
Anticipated Judicial Vacancies and the Power to Nominate
In July 2005, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired, but her retirement was expressly effective only upon the nomination and confirmation of her successor. As such, Justice O’Connor served on the Court for more than six additional months while the President nominated three different individuals to her seat and secured the confirmation of Justice Samuel A. Alito.
This Note addresses a simple, but unaddressed question: what triggers the President’s constitutional power to nominate under the Appointments Clause? The Note argues that there is a vacancy prerequisite to the operation of the Appointments Clause that requires either an actual vacancy in the office to be filled, or a sufficiently definite and irrevocable anticipated vacancy in such an office.
After briefly discussing the relatively recent development of the judicial retirement option, this Note turns to unique issues presented when life-tenured, Article III justices and judges retire. When an irremovable federal judge announces the intention to retire on some future date, that mere announcement does not create a sufficiently definite and irrevocable vacancy to trigger the operation of the Appointments Clause. Instead, the nomination and confirmation of successors upon anticipated judicial vacancies generate tension with the intended operation of the appointments process as well as underlying constitutional norms of judicial independence. Triggering the appointments process on a justice or judge’s intention to retire in the future may allow an “incumbent’s veto” over nominated successors, skew the advice and consent role of the Senate, delegate a removal-like power to the political branches, and establish a kind of “holdover judge” where vacancies would otherwise allow for the operation of the Recess Appointments Clause.
This Note concludes that due to the considerable constitutional difficulties that are presented, the Executive should not assume the power to nominate is constitutionally triggered by anticipated judicial vacancies.
Entrapment, Punishment, and the Sadistic State
The entrapment defense is a uniquely American institution, adopted in all American jurisdictions, and almost nowhere else. But while case law and scholarly literature dwell at length on entrapment’s what (what constitutes entrapment; the legal test to be applied), and sometimes on its who (who should rule on entrapment, judge or jury; who qualifies as a state actor), they have comparatively neglected its why—the underlying justification for a defense that, on further examination, seems to violate some of the most basic principles of criminal law jurisprudence. Why should someone who commits a crime, with a criminal state of mind, be found not guilty because the one who tempted him to commit the crime, an otherwise irrelevant fact, was—entirely unbeknownst to him—a police agent?
This Note first shows the insufficiency of existing justifications of the entrapment defense, then provides a more comprehensive explanation for the doctrine. This explanation reveals entrapment to be not a procedural “technicality” protecting a value extrinsic to the underlying prohibition, but rather a substantive defense whose roots run right to the criminal law’s heart: our reasons for punishment. A “punishment-centered” view reveals entrapment to be a manifestation of a totalitarian “sadistic state,” which treats the infliction of punishment not as a means of giving the guilty their just deserts, but as an end in itself, and shows the entrapment defense to be not only a limit on police investigatory technique, but an assertion of individual liberty against the state’s ability to punish.