Senior Research Fellow Arantxa Gandía Sellens awarded with Doctoral degree
Arantxa Gandía Sellens received the Doctoral degree from the Faculty of Law of the University of Valencia with the highest mark (excelente cum laude).
It is a great pleasure to congratulate Dr. Arantxa Gandía Sellens, currently a Senior Research Fellow at the MPI (Department of European and Comparative Procedural Law), for having been awarded the Doctoral degree by the Faculty of Law of the University of Valencia with the highest mark (excelente cum laude).
On 28 November 2015 Arantxa Gandía Sellens successfully defended her thesis entitled ‘La necesidad de flexibilizar la competencia judicial internacional exclusiva para determinar la validez de los derechos de patente’, both in Spanish and English, before a committee at the University of Valencia, consisting of Prof. Dr. José Luis Iglesias Buhigues (University of Valencia), Prof. Dr. Manuel Desantes Real (University of Alicante) and Prof. Dr. Marta Requejo Isidro (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg).
In her thesis, Dr. Gandía Sellens advocates for the softening of the exclusive jurisdiction rule for the validity of patent rights. According to the author, the rule of exclusive jurisdiction has lost its justification and leads to problems in judicial and arbitral proceedings, especially in patent infringement disputes before a court not having exclusive jurisdiction. In those disputes the patent invalidity is very often raised as a defense, leading to a stay of proceedings until the court with exclusive jurisdiction has decided the validity issue. Arantxa Gandía Sellens proposes to allow in such a case the court competent for the infringement case to also determine the patent validity, at least with inter partes effect.
