Patents and Global Administrative Law: Values, Principles, and Challenges

The book applies values and concepts from Global Administrative Law (GAL) to international patent law, demonstrating how limiting technocratic and overly economic language can be. Highlighting the administrative foundations of patent law, the book argues that, in its international form, it can be analysed using the same principles of participation, transparency, and accountability found in national administrative law.

At the heart of the book is a simple question: What does international patent law look like when we approach it through the lens of these values? What is being left out when patent law is described predominantly in terms of its technical legal provisions or economic impact? The book presents three interrelated contexts: EU patent law, bilateral trade agreements, and the multilateral space. Modern patent law is increasingly discussed in terms of national competitiveness or economic potential, which reveals only a narrow understanding of how patent law evolves and functions. The vocabulary of administrative law provides a fresh way of recasting, reframing, and re-describing the dynamics of international patent law in a way that is more accessible to those outside of a traditional patent scholarship audience. A fundamental objective of the book is to challenge the tendency towards technocratic isolation in patent law. The book uses accessible vocabulary and represents a new way of conceptualising and understanding how patent law develops on a global scale.

The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of patent law, international law, and administrative law.

David Tilt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo. His research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to intellectual property, exploring the metaphysical, cultural, and social dimensions of international patent law. He has published comparative legal analysis on specialised courts, the convergence of language around patent law and innovation in government, and national autonomy under the TRIPS Agreement. Currently he is working on a new project that is focused on the Middle East (the GCC in particular) and the potential for patent harmonisation and cooperation.