Supreme Court Activity
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Here is an update on recent activity at the Supreme Court in cases decided by the Federal Circuit. The Court granted the petition for certiorari in Rudisill v. McDonough, a veterans case raising a question related to GI Bill educational assistance. With respect to petitions, two new petitions were filed, one in a patent and one in a pro se case; a brief in opposition was filed in a patent case concerning inter partes review estoppel; and the Court denied petitions in two patent cases and five pro se cases. Here are the details.

Granted Cases

As we previously reported, the Supreme Court granted the petition for certiorari in Rudisill v. McDonough, a veterans case raising a question related to the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Specifically, the Supreme Court will review whether “a veteran who has served two separate and distinct periods of qualifying service under the Montgomery GI Bill, . . .  and under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, . . . is entitled to receive a total of 48 months of education benefits as between both programs, without first exhausting the Montgomery benefit in order to obtain the more generous Post-9/11 benefit.”

Petition Cases

New Petitions

New petitions were filed in two cases.

In Killian v. Vidal, Killian asked the Court to review the following two questions:

  1. “Have the numerous departures of the Supreme Court’s Alice/Mayo jurisprudence by the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit . . . enabled the USPTO to violate the Title 5 of the United States Code . . . and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution?”
  2. “Do the exceptions created by Article III courts of Title 35 U.S.C. § 101 exceed the constitutional authority of the courts?”

Also, a pro se petitioner filed a petition in Williams v. United States.

Brief in Opposition

Click-to-Call Technologies LP filed a brief in opposition in Ingenio, Inc. v. Click-to-Call Technologies LP, a patent case.

In this case, the petitioners presented the following questions for review:

  1. “Whether 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)’s IPR estoppel provision applies only to claims addressed in the final written decision, even if other claims were or could have been raised in the petition.”
  2. “Whether the Federal Circuit erroneously extended IPR estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e) to all grounds that reasonably could have been raised in the petition filed before an inter partes review is instituted, even though the text of the statute applies estoppel only to grounds that ‘reasonably could have [been] raised during that inter partes review.’”

Now, in its brief in opposition to the petition, Click-to-Call Technologies argues the Federal Circuit correctly recognized that “the IPR estoppel statute bars a petitioner from raising in a civil action any ‘ground’ for invalidating a patent claim which the petitioner ‘reasonably could have raised during’ the IPR.” It also contends the Federal Circuit correctly recognized that the petitioner “is attempting to escape the straightforward estoppel effects here through a (legally foreclosed) loophole of its own making.” It asserts “there is no legal error in the Federal Circuit’s reasoning” and that “this case presents no important legal issues for review and is a poor vehicle for the review of” the relevant statute.

Denials

The Supreme Court denied certiorari in seven cases: