by Dennis Crouch

The pending obviousness petition in Vanda v. Teva has prompted me to look back on some of the key Supreme Court cases cited in the briefs. Last week, I wrote about Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883) in a blog post titled The Quest for a Meaningful Threshold of Invention.  Today, I’m looking at Dow Chemical Co. v. Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co., 324 U.S. 320 (1945), an obviousness case decided just a few years before a rewriting of the 1952 Patent Act.  At the time, the doctrine was identified as “want of invention,” but the court’s analysis is familiar to anyone practicing patent law today.