Caldera Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Regents of the University

Federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction to try suits that are based on patents, which are themselves a creature of the federal Constitution. The appearance of a patent in state court is more than likely to unsettle lawyers and judges because, as one academic commentator observed; “Patents scare many lawyers. Mental charts of the law are apt to designate this unexplored territory as a federal enclave, peopled by dragons and serpents of purely federal origin.” (Cooper, State Law of Patent Exploitation (1972) 56 Minn. L.Rev. 313.) Even federal judges can be uneasy. One of the most eminent wrote that the federal courts “deal. . . with a great number of patents in the higher reaches of electronics, chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, optics, harmonics and nuclear physics, which are quite beyond the ability of the usual judge to understand without the expenditure of an inordinate amount of educational effort by counsel and of attempted self-education by the judge, and in many instances, even with it.” (Friendly, Federal Jurisdiction: A General View (1973) pp. 156-157.)

But the academic commentator cautioned that this trepidation is unreasonably exaggerated: “Even a timid…