Legal Commentary

One of the most frustrating things about teaching patent law is dealing with the perception that patent law is somehow "off limits" to people who do not have strong science and math backgrounds.  I suspect that most tax professors face the same problem.  Students are convinced that patents are incomprehensible without deep scientific knowledge.

In one way, the perception is justified.  Patents often are incomprehensible, but it is not because one needs deep scientific knowledge to understand them.  Instead, it is simply that most patents are linguistic monstrocities.  For example, here is a typical patent claim describing the simple invention of a weight plate with three handles (the "claim" is the part of the patent that describes what it covers):

"A weight plate for physical fitness including: a plate body formed with a central throughbore and having a plate periphery; said body further formed with solely a triad of spaced apart elongated handle openings disposed generally equiangularly and positioned radially outwardly from said central throughbore and at least midway out from the center of the body to said radial periphery, said openings having respective outboard edges cooperating with said plate to define a triad of integral handle elements for grasping by a single hand to effect transport of said weight plate."

Nobody can understand this claim on the first pass, science background or not.  But complicated langauge is hardly unique to patent law, since almost every elaborate regulatory regime (tax, but also food and drug, envionmental protection, and communications) involves very complicated legal language.  Becoming proficient in complicated langauge is a general skill that all lawyers should share.  Another piece of evidence that helps debunk the theory that patent law is complicated becuase it involves science is this recent paper finding that technically trained district judges do no better in avoiding reversal than their unwashed brethren.

Of course, the perception that patent law requires strong scientific skills that are rare among people with legal training is a net benefit to me, since fewer patent lawyers means that my skills command an anticompetitive premium in the market.