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About

I am a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where I research and teach issues relating to law & technology.

• email: polk@law.upenn.edu
• details: curriculum vitae

Recent Posts

• What is the Law of Obviousness?
• New Claim Construction Data
• Good New Obviousness Paper
• eBay v. MercExchange: A Victory for Patent Lawyers (and a loss for everyone else)
• Phillips Analysis, Part 2: What Happened to the Judges?

Archived Posts by Category

• Federal Circuit
• IP Politics
• Patents

Archives

• What is the Law of Obviousness?
• New Claim Construction Data
• Good New Obviousness Paper
• eBay v. MercExchange: A Victory for Patent Lawyers (and a loss for everyone else)
• Phillips Analysis, Part 2: What Happened to the Judges?

Forthcoming Publications

• The Federal Circuit and Patentability: An Empirical Assessment of the Law of Obviousness (with L. Petherbridge)

Recent Publications

• The Perfect Storm: Intellectual Property and Public Values, 72 Ford. L. Rev. 423 (2005)
• Reconsidering the DMCA, 42 Hou. L. Rev. 1107 (2005)
• Patent Portfolios, 154 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1 (2005) (with Gideon Parchomovsky).
• On Software Regulation, 78 S. Cal. L. Rev. 457 (2005).
• Exactly Backwards: A Comment on Technological Exceptionalism in the Patent Law, 54 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 749 (2004).
• Is the Federal Circuit Succeeding? An Empirical Assessment of Judicial Performance, 152 U. Penn. L. Rev 1105 (2004) (with L. Petherbridge).
• Of Patents and Path Dependency: A Comment on Burk & Lemley, 18 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 1341 (2004).
• (Mostly) Against Exceptionalism, in F. Scott Kieff, Advances In Genetics 50:367 (2003).
• Information Wants to Be Free: Intellectual Property and the Mythologies of Control, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 995 (2003).
• A slightly more complete list can be found here (SSRN).

Ongoing Research Projects

I've embarked on a number of long-term, data-oriented research projects (in addition to the more typical 'law-review' type articles.)

• The Obviousness Project: describing how § 103 is implemented, and its implications.
• Claim Construction: Ongoing Empirical Assessment of patent claim construction by the courts.
• FedCir: Data-Driven Assessment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (umbrella group for the above projects)
• The En Banc Project: Looking at the trends in en banc treatment of patent cases. (coming soon)

Classes

• Introduction to Intellectual Property
• Patent Law & Policy
• Advanced Topics in Intellectual Property Law

Credits

• Research librarian: Tim Von Dulm, Biddle Law Library
• Research assistant: Kristina Caggiano, class of 2007
• Web Apps: Christine Droesser, Penn Law ITS

Contact Info

R. Polk Wagner
Professor of Law
University of Pennsylvania Law School
3400 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104

on the web: http://www.polkwagner.com/

email: polk@law.upenn.edu

 

Copyright © R. Polk Wagner.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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