Two Centuries of Trademark and Copyright Law: A Citation-Network-Analysis Approach

The Supreme Court has decided many more patent cases than trademark or copyright cases. This is so not just in the past decade—the focus of the tenth annual Supreme Court IP Review at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, in September 2019—but in the past 20 decades. In gathering the entire body of the Court’s IP caselaw for study with cita-tion-network-analysis tools, I found that patent cases greatly outnum-ber trademark and copyright cases. Moreover, patent cases, especially patent and antitrust cases, dominate the metrics for the most central cases in the citation network.