Lexical properties: Trademarks, dictionaries, and the sense of the generic.

The third edition of Webster's International Dictionary, first published in 1961, represented a novel approach to lexicography. It recorded the English language used in everyday life, incorporating colloquial terms that previous grammarians would have considered unfit for any responsible dictionary. Many were scandalized by the new lexicography.

Dignity again.

Two recent contributions to this journal discuss a challenge to Stanford's time-lapse embryo monitoring patent, currently before the European Patent Office (EPO). Sterckx, Cockbain and Pennings (2017) would like to keep the morphokinetics of embryo division in the public domain; they argue that time-lapse monitoring (TLM) is a diagnostic method in the sense of European patent law and therefore unpatentable. In response, Pearce (2017) suggests that the jurisprudence of the EPO unambiguously says that TLM is not a diagnostic method.

Law machines: scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law.

Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted.