Is the United States Finally Ready for a Patent Small Claims Court?

In the past few years, legislative proposals for United States patent reform have centered on changing the Patent Act. 1 Some commentators have questioned patent reform, asking whether such proposals favor large interests at the expense of individuals and small businesses. 2 Overlooked since 1992 in discussions about patent reform is an obscure proposal that ought to help individuals, small businesses, large businesses, consumers, and the court system itself-a Patent Small Claims Court.In the early 1990s, several important policy groups, including the American Bar Association ("ABA") and the American Intellectual Property Law Association ("AIPLA"), voiced support for such a court, but, ultimately, no one took up the cause.3 At the time, these policy groups expressed concerns that transaction costs for patent enforcement under the current U.S. system are prohibitively high for a significant subset of inventors-namely, those who stand to recover only small sums from any given infringer.4 In this article, I re-propose (with improvements) a Patent Small Claims Court for the United States.Time has shown that such a court will credibly address a major failure in the current patent system-its