Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene's Energy Group, LLC
The Court upheld "inter partes review," the patent office process that lets a specialized board revisit and cancel wrongly issued patents, ruling it does not violate the Constitution's guarantee of independent judges or the right to a jury trial.
Because granting a patent is something the government itself controls as a public benefit rather than a private right, the Court said Congress can also let an executive agency take a second look and cancel that grant without going through a federal court.
How it got here: A federal district court favored Oil States while the Patent Office board separately found the patent invalid; the Federal Circuit summarily affirmed the board, and Oil States asked the Supreme Court to review its constitutional challenge.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Oil States Energy Services, an oilfield services company, sued a competitor, Greene's Energy Group, for infringing its patent on wellhead equipment used in hydraulic fracturing. Greene's Energy both defended the lawsuit in court and separately asked the Patent Office to review and cancel the patent through the newer "inter partes review" process created by a 2011 law.
The question before the Court
Can a patent office board, rather than a federal judge and jury, cancel an already-issued patent after finding it should never have been granted?
Why it matters
Patent owners can continue to have their patents challenged and canceled through a faster, cheaper administrative process at the Patent Office rather than only in federal court. This preserves a widely used tool that businesses use to knock out weak patents, while patent holders lose the guarantee that only an Article III judge and jury can strip away their patent rights.
What changes now
The Federal Circuit's judgment upholding cancellation of Oil States' patent claims stands, and inter partes review continues to operate as before. The ruling does not resolve other open questions, such as whether the process can apply retroactively to older patents or whether it satisfies due process, leaving those issues for future cases.
What this does not decide
The Court said it addressed only the specific Article III and jury-trial arguments Oil States raised. It did not decide whether patent infringement suits could be moved out of court, whether applying the process to older patents is constitutional, whether it satisfies due process, or whether patents count as property under the Due Process or Takings Clauses.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer joined the majority in full but wrote separately to clarify that the ruling should not be read to suggest that only public-rights matters can ever be handled by agencies instead of courts. He pointed to precedent showing agencies can sometimes adjudicate private-rights disputes too, so the public-rights label used here is sufficient but not the only path to upholding agency adjudication.
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
“Until recently, most everyone considered an issued patent a personal right—no less than a home or farm—that the federal government could revoke only with the concurrence of independent judges.”The dissent's central objection that patents deserve the same court protection as other property.
Justice Gorsuch argued that patents have long been treated as personal property that only an independent judge, not a political appointee, could take away, tracing this protection to the founders' concerns about judicial independence learned from pre-Revolutionary experience. He read the historical record as showing that courts, not the executive, resolved virtually all patent validity disputes in England and America, and would have held that Congress cannot hand that job to a Patent Office board.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the public-rights doctrine, which lets Congress assign certain disputes between the government and private parties to agencies rather than to judges, because those disputes involve government-created privileges rather than private rights that existed independent of government action.
- The Court reasoned that granting a patent is itself such a public right: a patent is a government-created "public franchise" giving an inventor the right to exclude others, not a right that exists automatically at common law.
- Because inter partes review is simply a second look at that same government grant using the same statutory standards the Patent Office used the first time, the Court treated it as part of the same public-rights matter as the original grant, not a new intrusion into a private right.
- The Court rejected the argument that historical English and American practice required patent validity to be decided only by courts, noting that 18th-century England also allowed the Privy Council, an executive body, to cancel patents, and that public-rights matters can be assigned to courts, agencies, or Congress interchangeably.
- The Court also rejected relying on how court-like the Patent Office's procedures looked, holding that using trial-like procedures and titles such as "judge" and "judgment" does not turn an agency proceeding into an exercise of judicial power reserved for Article III courts.
- Having found no Article III problem, the Court concluded that the Seventh Amendment jury-trial right does not independently apply either, because that right only attaches to matters that must be decided by a court in the first place.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. v. Aultman (169 U. S. 606)
The Court said this older case only described an outdated 1870 patent law, not a constitutional rule against agency cancellation.
Distinguishes United States v. American Bell Telephone Co. (128 U. S. 315)
Treated as describing the old statutory scheme rather than establishing a lasting constitutional limit on agency review.