Learning American Patent Law Through Court Decision Analysis

Abstract

This article provides a method for non-American-trained law students to analyze American patent law cases. Particularly, the method is designed for Taiwanese students. The American legal writing has its own style. Without being trained in an American law school, a person cannot analyze the cases comprehensively. It is necessary to develop a method to help local students to analyze cases, so they can acquire the knowledge of American patent law. For elaborating the proposed method, this article begins with a background introduction about American legal writing and patent law. Then, five aspects of the proposed method are explained in details with examples. In the conclusion, a brief summary of the proposed method is provided. First, re-organize the court decision by briefly analyzing the first sentence of each paragraph. Second, identify whether a paragraph is about facts, legal doctrines, or legal issue analyses. Third, summarize the legal rules applied and rulings made. Because of the formality of the legal writing tradition in American, it is not difficult to identify the law applied by the court, and that the relevant facts supporting the rulings in a decision can also be identified, so that those facts in that decision could be useful for supplying a legal opinion under the facts provided by a client.