Supreme Court Decision Alert - May 30, 2017

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued two decisions, described below, of interest to the business community.

• Intellectual Property—Patent Exhaustion
• Federal Employer's Liability Act—Personal Jurisdiction

Intellectual Property—Patent Exhaustion

Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l, Inc., No. 15-1189

The doctrine of patent exhaustion holds that, after the first authorized sale of a patented article, the patent rights in that particular article are exhausted and the patentee cannot exert any further control over the article under patent law. Today, the Supreme Court held that this doctrine applies "regardless of any restrictions the patentee purports to impose or the location of the sale," abrogating two Federal Circuit decisions from 1992 and 2001 that had respectively held that (1) patentees could avoid patent exhaustion by imposing express restrictions on the use or resale of an article at the time of the first sale; and (2) a patentee's U.S.