Patents are widely recognized as a key driver of R&D and commercialization in the biotechnology industry, particularly for startups. In 2008, a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (including this chapter's author) conducted the most comprehensive survey to date on the role of patenting among biotech and other startups. The Berkeley Patent Survey asked senior managers about their motivations for seeking (and not seeking) patents, the number of patents and applications they had filed and acquired, the impact of third-party patents on their R&D and commercialization efforts, and their reliance on patents compared with other forms of intellectual property. In general, biotech startups reported obtaining a very large number of patents, primarily to prevent others from copying their products and services. In addition, they reported that patents were useful for raising financing, negotiating licensing deals, and bargaining during acquisition negotiations. Biotech startups generally did not perceive third-party patents as particularly problematic to their own R&D and commercialization efforts. Patents and trade secrets were the most dominant forms of intellectual property used by biotech companies, with patents slightly edging out trade secrets. Between 2008 and 2025, several other researchers have performed empirical studies on the role of patenting among biotech startups, largely with similar findings to the Berkeley Patent Survey. This chapter explores the findings of those studies against the backdrop of the Berkeley Survey and changes in the law and advances in technology since 2008, suggesting avenues for further research.

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From at least the early twentieth century, legal scholars have recognized that rights and other legal relations inhere between individual legal actors, forming a vast and complex social network. Yet, no legal scholar has used the mathematical machinery of network theory to formalize these relationships. Here, we propose the first such approach by modelling a rudimentary, static set of real property relations using network theory. Then, we apply our toy model to measure the level of modularity-essentially, the community structure-among aggregations of these real property relations and associated actors. In so doing, we show that even for a very basic set of relations and actors, law may employ modular structures to manage complexity. Property, torts, contracts, intellectual property, and other areas of the law arguably reduce information costs in similar, quantifiable ways by chopping up the world of interactions between parties into manageable modules that are semi-autonomous. We also posit that our network science approach to jurisprudential issues can be adapted to quantify many other important aspects of legal systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'A complexity science approach to law and governance'.

Scientific "law" and human-made law ("social law") are both "laws" in a very general sense—scientific laws "govern" the workings of the material world and social laws govern the behavior of people. Beyond this superficial resemblance, do social laws partake of the same sorts of mathematical structures as scientific laws? Many theorists have proposed formal deontic-oriented logical models of legal rights and other entitlements. Here, leveraging the formalism of Wesley Hohfeld and related work, this article proposes a novel, mathematical model of legal entitlements. This model allows for physical and mathematical properties—such as entropy, indeterminacy, temperature, and modularity—to be adapted to provide for quantitative measures of the properties of legal systems. Moreover, previous logical models exhibit an important feature: if all relevant information is known, legal actors hold determinate sets of legal entitlements. Although theorists have modeled legal entitlements under conditions of incomplete information, which can effectively lead to indeterminacy, even with complete information, legal entitlements can exhibit indeterminacy. Unlike classical indeterminacy, which is of a stochastic nature, this sort of "inherent" indeterminacy is akin to—and can be readily modeled by—the notion of "indeterminacy" in quantum mechanical formalism. These results have important implications for the nature of legal rules, legal artificial intelligence, game theory and the law, and the ontology of rule-based systems more generally.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter covers key aspects of patent prosecution and counseling. First, it deals with a variety of topics relating to administrative practice before the USPTO, encompassing patent prosecution and post-grant processes. It also covers the concepts of domestic and foreign priority. Second, the chapter addresses selected aspects of patent transactions, particularly patent ownership and licensing, as well as the doctrine of double patenting.

Wesley Hohfeld began his landmark 1913 article, Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, by impugning existing analytical treatments of trusts, yet noticeably never fully explained his own view of trusts as a “complex aggregate” of “fundamental” relations.1 In the last footnote to the article, Hohfeld stated that in his “next article … some attention will be given to the nature and analysis of complex legal interests, or aggregates of jural relations.”2 Unfortunately, as the editor of his collected works, Walter Wheeler Cook, explained in an annotated version of that footnote, “the ‘next article’ deals chiefly with rights, etc., in personam and rights, etc., in rem. The author’s untimely death prevented the carrying out of the remainder of the plan.”3

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. (i>Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers infringement. It addresses the element-by-element comparisons required in establishing literal infringement and infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, and also covers means-plus-function claim limitations. The chapter also explores how the statute and case law define acts of infringement. In particular, the chapter discusses the geographic locus of infringing acts, the problem of divided infringement, indirect infringement, and transnational infringement.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers the patent document, including patent claims, focusing on the substantive rules of claim construction and definiteness.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This file comprises the casebook in its entirety, including the cover, table of contents, preface, and chapters covering historical and economic perspectives on patent law, an overview of the modern patent system, the patent document and its claims, subject matter eligibility, utility, disclosure, anticipation, obviousness, infringement, defenses, and remedies.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers anticipation and the application of 35 U.S.C. ยง 102 both pre- and post-AIA. The chapter introduces the concept of anticipation (including the single-source test, inherency, and the enabling reference standard), the loss-of-right doctrines (including those based on documentary prior art, public use, and the on-sale bar), prior art based on prior-filed patent applications, and other forms of patent-defeating prior art (including the concept of derivation and the pre-AIA novelty provisions).

Wesley Hohfeld was an important legal theorist from the early 20th century. His article, "Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning," which appeared in the Yale Law Journal in 1913, is one of the most-cited law articles of all time. It has had a profound impact not only in the field of jurisprudence but also on numerous scholars, lawyers, and jurists more broadly, notably including the drafters of the Restatement (First) of Property and judges of the U.S. Supreme Court and many lower courts. Although the article was intended for students, in actuality, it has been quite difficult to parse for students and professors alike. This chapter offers an annotated and slightly condensed version of the article. Textual annotations aim to explain key paragraphs and sentences in fairly basic terms, while footnote annotations are intended for scholars wishing to take a “deep dive” into the Hohfeldian typology. Although the chapter’s analysis generally endorses Hohfeld’s assertions, in part, it also provides friendly critique. This critique, along with careful interpretation of the original text, aligns Hohfeld’s typology more closely—though not completely—with a formalist approach than previous characterizations in the legal literature, which have largely viewed the typology and Hohfeld’s work as an early foray into legal realism.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers subject matter eligibility, particularly for living subject matter, processes and software, and doctrine following the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers disclosure doctrines, including enablement, written description, and (briefly) best mode.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This file includes the cover, preface, and table of contents. Individual chapters are posted separately. Topics covered in the casebook include the history, economics, and theory of patent law; the patent and its claims; subject matter eligibility; utility; disclosure; anticipation; obviousness; infringement; defenses; remedies; and (soon) post-issuance challenges, ownership, and licensing. The casebook also includes many student problems that provide practical applications of these topics.

Many scholars have employed the term "entropy" in the context of law and legal systems to roughly refer to the amount of "uncertainty" present in a given law, doctrine, or legal system. Just a few of these scholars have attempted to formulate a quantitative definition of legal entropy, and none have provided a precise formula usable across a variety of legal contexts. Here, relying upon Claude Shannon's definition of entropy in the context of information theory, I provide a quantitative formalization of entropy in delineating, interpreting, and applying the law. In addition to offering a precise quantification of uncertainty and the information content of the law, the approach offered here provides other benefits. For example, it offers a more comprehensive account of the uses and limits of "modularity" in the law-namely, using the terminology of Henry Smith, the use of legal "boundaries" (be they spatial or intangible) that "economize on information costs" by "hiding" classes of information "behind" those boundaries. In general, much of the "work" performed by the legal system is to reduce legal entropy by delineating, interpreting, and applying the law, a process that can in principle be quantified.

These are the codebooks for the study reported in Cycles of Obviousness (2019), which contain the instructions on how to code district and Federal Circuit opinions with determinations of patent obviousness issued between 2003 and 2013.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers obviousness, including the history of the doctrine in the United States, the Graham framework and secondary factors, and the modern obviousness analysis under KSR and subsequent cases.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook covers remedies in patent infringement actions, including preliminary and permanent injunctions, ITC exclusion orders, lost profits, reasonable royalties, ongoing royalties, attorneys’ fees, enhanced damages, patent marking, and declaratory judgment relief.

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook begins with an overview of the patent right, then covers historical and economic perspectives, concluding with an overview of the modern patent system and document.