When Laboratory Corporation of America asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal, most IP experts thought it was little more than an act of desperation. The November 2004 certiorari petition asked the extremely busy High Court to review a technical issue that was of relatively little importance: Did a method patent on diagnosing vitamin deficiency specify the method in sufficient detail, or were the terms so vague that the patent had to be struck down?
However, the Court turned the case in a surprising direction. While pondering the petition, it invited the solicitor general in February 2005 to submit a brief addressing an issue that hadn’t previously been raised in the case: “Is the patent [at issue] invalid because one cannot patent ‘laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas’?”
