Design patents are hot. Scholars and policymakers are increasingly focusing on this once-niche area of law. However, many of the empirical studies in this area—including old ones that still get cited—were methodologically questionable from the start, have become outdated, or both. In this Article, we make two sets of contributions to this important and underdeveloped literature. First, we review the empirical studies of design patents thus far, including those that pre- and post-date the creation of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and we update the findings of those studies. Second, we consider a set of institutional questions that, to our knowledge, the prior literature has not even broached. Beyond the federal courts, we explore design patent enforcement at the U.S. International Trade Commission and the use of administrative procedures to challenge design patents in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. These contributions contextualize the design patent system within the broader debates about U.S. intellectual property policy
