Patent Law and Policy: Cases and Materials

by Robert P. Merges, John Fitzgerald Duffy

This leading casebook makes Patent Law accessible to a wide audience of students and instructors. Patent Law and Policy provides numerous diagrams and figures, concise explanations of relevant legal principles, and to the extent possible, cases involving relatively simple technologies. This edition includes additional international materials, new statutory provisions, and a host of recent decisions. In a new chapter entitled The Legal Process of the Patent System, the authors provide a systematic treatment of process rulesan area that has recently been the subject of ongoing and proposed reform. In addition to providing the most recent developments, the authors have also tried to put the current evolution of the law in historical context, thus expanding coverage of historically important cases in areas where the law is changing dramatically. Patent Law and Policy is supported by an author-hosted Web page with supplemental teaching tools, including a current supplement PowerPoint slides. The authors provide periodic email updates on important issues (e.g., "Top Ten Patent Cases") to professors who adopt this book.

Patent Law and Policy: Statutory and Treaty Supplement, 2005 Edition) / Supplement is also available

Genres: Law, Nonfiction

1374 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Robert Patrick Merges

Reviews

[Joe]

Decent overview for a patent law class. My biggest complaint is that it's disorganized, which made it even more difficult to read than you'd expect from a patent text book.

Specifically, each section contains a list of 3-12 "notes," but the notes are not organized by importance or any other logical order. This meant I had to read nearly all of them to determine if I needed to know the material or not. Since they weren't really connected to each other from one to the next, it was tiring to read them.

On the plus side, the material is up-to-date, and from what I can tell, it contains all the information you need for a textbook that introduces you to patents (assuming you also get the supplementary material available for free with the textbook purchase).