. . . the Supreme Court can only decide a couple of patent cases even in a banner year. And, many important patent issues may be so obscure as to discourage its generalist judges from addressing them. The rest, necessarily, are left to us. We have the expertise and the will to resolve doctrinal problems. What we lack is mainly the opportunity. Why for example did it take a full decade to revisit State Street? Because no one asked us to until recently. The same can be said of the central issue decided in KSR. It was never simply presented to us in a petition for en banc treatment. Oddly, we receive over a hundred a year. Yet few raise such fundamental issues as eligible subject matter under §101, or the Teaching-Suggestion-Motivation test, or the proper methodology for assessing requests for the permanent injunction, or barring them, future damages.
Speaking at the Harvard Law School Conference On Intellectual Property Law, September 9, 2008.