Supreme Court Rules on Scope of Federal Contractors' Rights in Federally Funded Inventions
Client Alert | 1 min read | 06.07.11
On June 6, 2011, the United States Supreme Court, by a 7-2 margin, held in Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., No. 09-1159, that the term "subject invention" in the Bayh-Dole Act (35 U.S.C. § 200, et seq.), the statute that allocates certain rights in federally funded "subject invention[s]," includes only inventions for which the contractor has obtained a valid assignment from the employee inventor(s), and, therefore, that a contractor (and presumably the government) cannot obtain rights to an invention under the Bayh-Dole Act absent such an assignment. In so holding, the Court stated that the Bayh-Dole Act "simply assures contractors that they may keep title to whatever it is they already have" – which serves as a reminder to federal contractors desiring title to their employees' inventions to obtain valid assignments.
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On June 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a formal opinion concluding that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission’s (EEOC) existing interpretations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) disparate-impact liability, including the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), are unconstitutional. According to the opinion, EEOC’s prior interpretations contemplate liability based on disproportionately adverse effects alone, without regard to an employer’s likely intent, rather than treating disparate impact as an evidentiary mechanism to “smoke out” intentional discrimination. DOJ found that this approach functions as a “qualified racial-proportionality mandate” that places “a racial thumb on the scales, often requiring employers to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies, and to make decisions based on (because of) those racial outcomes.” The opinion fulfills one mandate of Executive Order 14281, which rejected disparate-impact liability insofar as it “creates a near insurmountable presumption that unlawful discrimination exists wherever there are any differences in outcomes among different [demographic groups].”
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