Following Helen Smith’s post reporting from the Oxford unitary patent conference, I was interested to see this article by Franklin Dehousse, Professor (in abeyance) at the University of Liège and judge at the Court of Justice of the European Union (General Court) – The Unified Court on Patents: The New Oxymoron of European Law. The article forms part of the Egmont Papers, published by the Egmont Institute.

Professor/Judge Dehousse first lays out some background describing attempts to create an integrated European patent. He then examines Opinion 1/09 of the Court of Justice and its impact.

The second part of the paper looks at implications – for patent law, for the institutional system, and for the EU courts system, and finally gives some conclusions.

Sections 4.2 and 6.4 focus on the language regime and translation requirements.

You can download the paper here.

For more background see these past posts here and here.