For decades, the University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law (IPIL) National Conference has gathered small groups of distinguished intellectual property scholars and practitioners from around the world for symposium-style discussions of works in progress in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The twenty-first such conference was held on June 7, 2025, and brought together an outstanding group of patent law scholars to discuss the essays published in this issue. The wide array of topics ranges from science fiction’s potential influence on innovation, to China’s rise as a dominant patent filer; yet all of these outstanding essays relate in one way or another to measuring patent law and theory against real-world data and events.
To begin with, in Necessary Parties in Patent Cases: Patent Venue and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19, Professor Jonas Anderson, along with practitioners Michelle Aspen, Sam Korte, and Jonathan Stroud, examines a new litigation strategy that has emerged to circumvent the law of venue in patent cases. The authors explain that by suing only foreign affiliates and omitting U.S. subsidiaries, some patent plaintiffs are able to have their cases heard in the Eastern District of Texas, even if the defendants do not have significant operations there, thus bypassing the Supreme Court’s attempt to limit this sort of forum shopping in TC Heartland. The article proposes that the Eastern District of Texas should follow the Fifth Circuit’s (rather than the Federal Circuit’s) approach to mandatory joinder, thereby ensuring that domestic affiliates cannot be excluded from litigation merely to game venue rules. Professor Anderson has written extensively on patent law venue issues, and he and his experienced co-authors do a fantastic job of explaining and proposing a remedy to this contemporary and problematic litigation strategy in this important and practical piece.
Next, in Do Academic Researchers Care About Patent Infringement? A PCR Case Study, Professor Janet Freilich takes an in-depth look at patent litigation involving the polymerase chain reaction in the 1990s, and how academic researchers responded. The essay explains how, in that litigation, a group of academic researchers was not sued but was named as potential direct infringers, providing a basis for indirect infringement by the defendant, which sold an essential component of PCR to scientists.
Professor Freilich shows that academic scientists did indeed adjust their behavior in response to this high-profile litigation, moving away from potentially infringing products and towards the component sold by the patent owner, thus challenging the common narrative that academic researchers simply ignore patents. Given the scarcity of empirical evidence in this area, this study provides a useful data point for scholars and policymakers investigating the impact of patents on academic research.
On a more theoretical note, Professor Camilla Hrdy, along with her co-author Daniel Brean, delves into science fiction writing and its potential real-world implications.
In Testing the Gernsback Hypothesis: Science Fiction’s Influence on Patents and Innovation, these authors explore various methodologies for attempting to measure the extent to which science fiction writing inspires actual patentable inventions. These distinguished scholars show how, although for various possible reasons science fiction is rarely cited as prior art, more informal references to science fiction ideas by authors such as Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov often appear in the patent record and explore various possible explanations for this interesting phenomenon. In this fascinating and well-written piece, the authors posit that these informal references may in many cases be highly indicative of science fiction’s influence on patenting and innovation.
Returning back to earth, in The Double Patenting Puzzle, Professor Michael Risch examines the commonly stated patent law maxim: “One patent per invention,” showing just how poorly this maxim actually measures up to real-world practices. Professor Risch considers the justifications for the double patenting doctrine, how the rationale for it has shifted over the years, and whether the doctrine continues to make sense in light of current data and modern practice. The interesting and circuitous history of the use of terminal disclaimers as a method to cure obviousness-type double patenting rejections is also reviewed. This versatile essay utilizes a deep historical review of the relevant caselaw and legislative history, along with rigorous data analysis diving into issues such as the statistical relationship between double patenting and terminal disclaimers, ultimately offering a refreshing take on the commonly misunderstood doctrine of double patenting.
Finally, in Is China’s Patent Boom a Bust?, Professor Andrew Torrance and co-authors Lisa Friedman and Tanya Singh draw on network science and bibliometric theory to challenge the narrative that China is ascending to lead the world in innovation and patenting. This narrative is largely based on the fact that China has recently surpassed the United States as measured by the traditional yardstick of simple patent counts. But the authors explain that more patents do not necessarily equal more innovation, so rather than simplistically focusing on patent quantity, this important essay discusses various sophisticated methodologies for measuring patent quality based on eigenvector centrality and community detection. The authors find that while China has indeed achieved quantitative dominance in patent filings, the United States maintains a substantial lead when these more complex measures of patent quality are properly taken into consideration.
We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of conference fellows Nicole Morris, Dennis Crouch, and Laura Dolbow, whose insightful comments during the symposium discussion no doubt contributed further to the quality of these final pieces. It was an honor and a pleasure to moderate this event and to discuss these excellent works with such a distinguished group of internationally recognized scholars. We hope you enjoy them and that they contribute in positive ways to the development of patent law and policy.