Don't judge a book by its title

Abstract

The winner of the IPKat’s poll for Best Intellectual Property Book 2018 was Intellectual Property and the Judiciary. As a judge specializing (albeit not exclusively) in intellectual property (IP) law, the title certainly piqued my interest. It should be stated at the outset, however, that in my opinion the title is slightly misleading. A more accurate title would be ‘Intellectual Property and Courts and Tribunals’. The distinction perhaps is a subtle one, but nevertheless a real one. The primary focus of the volume is upon the contribution of various courts and tribunals to IP law, although the choice of courts and tribunals is oddly selective—for example, it does not include any of the national courts that currently decide IP cases in Europe. While a few of the chapters do touch on the question of the judges who sit in the selected courts and tribunals, at least in the context of discussing court specialization, there is little discussion of such matters as who the judges are, what their qualifications are, what caseloads they have and what influence they exert on IP law in their respective jurisdictions. A theme that does surface, albeit not until page 178 (in the contribution by Vincent Cassiers and Alain Strowel) and only intermittently thereafter, is the extent to which IP law is judge-made law; but this important question is not systematically discussed, still less the desirability or otherwise of judges making IP law.