As I noted here yesterday, the Supreme Court has asked the SG to offer the views of the U.S. on the certworthiness of the declaratory judgment jurisdiction question presented by Apotex Inc. v. Pfizer, Inc., No. 05-1006.

Dennis Crouch (Patently-O) puts some more flesh on the bones here.

An interesting possibility to ponder: I do not know whether the Supreme Court looks for threads that connect the cases that could come before it in a given term. So perhaps it’s neither here nor there to note that the Court has already granted review in a patent case raising a declaratory judgment jurisdiction issue. The case, MedImmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 05-608 (cert. granted 2/21/2006). Patently-O wrote about the grant here. The question presented in MedImmune links back to the Court’s repudiation of licensee estoppel in Lear v. Adkins (1969). The question is MedImmune is, compressing just slightly, “Does Article III … require a patent licensee to refuse to pay royalties and commit material breach of the license agreement before suing to declare the patent invalid, unenforceable, or not infringed?”  Perhaps the Court is intrigued about declaratory judgment jurisdiction in patent cases generally …