Thursday, July 27, 2023

Gómez-Arostegui and Bottomley on Injunctions and Jury Trials

Tomás Gómez-Arostegui and Sean Bottomley have posted a paper on ssrn titled Patent Infringement Suits and the Right to Jury Trial, 72 Am. U. L. Rev. 1247 (forthcoming 2023).  Here is a link to the paper, and here is the abstract: 

This Article analyzes whether the Seventh Amendment affords a right to a jury trial in suits in which the owner of a patent seeks only equitable relief against an accused infringer. The existence of jury rights carries important consequences for litigants. Like many issues involving application of the Constitution, the availability and scope of the right to a jury depends on eighteenth-century English legal history. Current doctrine holds that litigants in equity had no right to a jury in patent cases in England c.1791 and therefore that litigants today who seek only injunctive relief possess no such right either. But as we demonstrate here, the relevant historical record shows the contrary, and thus many litigants have a constitutional right to a jury where the courts presently deny them. We reach our conclusion after undertaking the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date, which includes marshaling hundreds of eighteenth-century records (mostly in manuscript) from the National Archives of the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

I haven’t read too far into the article yet, but this sounds very interesting.

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