USAA v. PNC: Costume Changes in the IPR Theatre

by Dennis Crouch

Last week a friend of mine was stopped by the police for jaywalking across Ninth Street here in Columbia, Missouri. If you know that block by Sparky’s, you know it functions almost like a pedestrian mall. She was asked to sit on the curb while the officer wrote the ticket — meanwhile a dozen other folks made the same cross‑over. Same place, same manner of crossing, but only one citation. The experience was mildly absurd and somewhat humiliating and it captures a basic fairness intuition that also animates administrative law: treat like cases alike.

That is the theme of a new petition for certiorari in USAA v. PNC, arguing that the USPTO’s IPR decision was “arbitrary and capricious” because it failed to “justify a different result reached on saliently similar facts, but involving a different party.”  [20250805161943722_1. Petition][20250805161952153_1a. Petition Appendix]