Rosen on The 1881 Trademark Act and the Supreme Court @zvisrosen

Zvi S. Rosen, George Washington University Law School, is publishing In the Shadow of the Trade-Mark Cases: The 1881 Trademark Act and the Supreme Court in Forgotten Comparative Intellectual Property Law (Edward Elgar, 2020). Here is the abstract.

In 1879, the US Supreme Court famously struck away federal trademark law in the TradeMark Cases, leading Congress to leap into action and pass a new trademark statute within two years. Much less famously, though, the same thing happened again 24 years later in a largely forgotten case, Warner v. Searle & Hereth, leading to the passage of the 1905 trademark law within two years. This is the story of how a commercial dispute between two early pharmaceutical companies led to the first American trademark law of the 20th Century.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.