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Not too long ago, in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U. S. 446 (2015), another case involving a judicially created rule of patent law, the Court applied a “superpowered form of stare decisis.” Id., MINERVA SURGICAL, INC. v. HOLOGIC, INC. ALITO, J., dissenting at 458.
—————— 5 Under similar circumstances in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U. S. 446 (2015), every Member of this Court assessed a judge- made patent-law doctrine through the lens of stare decisis, see id., at 455–465; id., at 470–472 (ALITO, J., dissenting), even though “Congress ha[d] repeatedly amended ... the specific provision ... on which [our earlier decision nominally] rested,” id., at 456 (majority opinion).
In Lear, Inc. v. Adkins, 395 U. S. 653 (1969), for exam- ple, we disavowed the closely related doctrine of licensee es- toppel, noting along the way that the exception articulated MINERVA SURGICAL, INC. v. HOLOGIC, INC. BARRETT, J., dissenting in Scott Paper had “undermined the very basis of the ‘gen- eral rule’ ” of assignor estoppel.
The Court describes assignor estoppel much more narrowly: “The doctrine applies only Cite as: 594 U. S. ____ (2021) BARRETT, J., dissenting when an inventor says one thing (explicitly or implicitly) in assigning a patent and the opposite in litigating against the patent’s owner.” Ante, at 5.