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Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with whether living organisms can be patented.Writing for a five-justice majority, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger held that human-made bacteria could be patented under the patent laws of the United States because such an invention constituted a "manufacture" or "composition of matter".
Precedent is a judicial decision that serves as an authority for courts when deciding subsequent identical or similar cases. [1] [2] [3] Fundamental to common law legal systems, precedent operates under the principle of stare decisis ("to stand by things decided"), where past judicial decisions serve as case law to guide future rulings, thus promoting consistency and predictability.
Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013), was a Supreme Court case, which decided that "a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.” [1] However, the Court allowed patenting of complementary DNA, which contains exactly the same protein-coding base pair sequence as the natural ...
Teaching intelligent design in public school biology classes violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (and Article I, Section 3, of the Pennsylvania State Constitution) because intelligent design is not science and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious ...
The Supreme Court upheld state court decisions in Missouri, which had refused to register a woman as a lawful voter because that state's laws allowed only men to vote. The Minor v. Happersett ruling was based on an interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court readily accepted that Minor ...
A unanimous opinion is one in which all of the justices agree and offer one rationale for their decision. A majority opinion is a judicial opinion agreed to by more than half of the members of a court. A majority opinion sets forth the decision of the court and an explanation of the rationale behind the court's decision.
An unpublished opinion is a decision of a court that is not available for citation as precedent because the court deems the case to have insufficient precedential value. In the system of common law, each judicial decision becomes part of the body of law used in future decisions. However, some courts reserve certain decisions, leaving them ...
Where a wide new class of distinguished cases is made, such as distinguishing all cases on privity of contract law in the establishment of the court-made tort of negligence or a case turns on too narrow a set of variations in facts ("turns on its own facts") compared to the routinely applicable precedent(s), such decisions are at high risk of being successfully overruled (by higher courts) on ...