The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a stipulated judgment of noninfringement in a patent infringement dispute after construing a disputed claim term, taking a more literal approach than the district court...more
Imagine you're crafting an argument in an appellate court. The key statute has language that favors you, but a decades-old Supreme Court case goes the opposite way. Or, from the other side, the case is favorable but the...more
I. Introduction Historically, Texas courts could not resort to extrinsic evidence to construe an unambiguous will. San Antonio Area Foundation v. Lang, 35 S.W.3d 636 (Tex. 2000)....more
A recent New York case highlights the importance of thoroughly analyzing all contract language in minimizing project risk. In Gilbane Bldg. Co./TDX Construction Corp. v. St. Paul Fire & Mar. Ins. Co., the Court of Appeals of...more
Interpreting a contract can be like creating an Urtext edition. As an Urtext edition is supposed to convey the composer’s original intention, the goal in contract interpretation is to determine the parties’ intentions when...more
• Considered without reference to a corresponding definition, Section 365(n) of the Bankruptcy Code seems clear. If the trustee or debtor-in-possession, as licensor, rejects an executory intellectual property license, the...more
It is industry standard in California for owners of a construction project to make monthly payments to a contractor for work it has completed, less a certain percentage that is withheld as a guarantee of future satisfactory...more
In Stephens v. Beard, a husband shot his wife, who died immediately, and then shot himself. He died hours later in the hospital. No. 12-13-00160-CV, 2014 Tex. App. LEXIS 3895 (Tex. App.—Tyler April 10, 2014), rev’d, No....more
Mintz Levin has won extraordinary relief for its client, Straight Path IP Group, Inc., convincing the Federal Circuit to completely reverse and remand an IPR final written decision adverse to a patent owner for the first...more
In recent years, reformers of trust law have been hard at work defanging the plain meaning rule, primarily by liberalizing the doctrines of reformation and deviation. The rule is discussed generally in §8.15.6 of Loring and...more
Augme Techs., Inc. v. Yahoo! Inc. - Addressing a district court’s construction of the claim term “embedded” code as code “written into the HTML code of the web page” and the related summary judgment of non-infringement...more
In Glassman, the plaintiff insured sued his disability insurer, Crown Life, claiming that while Crown Life had been paying his disability claim for well over two decades, it had failed to increase his benefits each year due...more
Many practitioners, both near and far, assert that a good number of our courts’ opinions, whether at the state or the federal level, are simply “result oriented” decisions where the court has decided what result it wants to...more
Consistent with prior judicial precedent, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently applied a literal interpretation of the Subpart F inclusion rules based on the plain meaning of Sections 951 and 956....more
On May 1, 2012, in a case argued by Saul Ewing attorney John F. Stoviak (with assistance from Braden A. Borger on the Brief), the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas (Jefferson County) held that reliance is not an essential...more