After several decades of negotiations, European Member States finally agreed on the establishment of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), a centralized and highly specialized court. The European patent system is an intricate, multilevel governance system. Safeguarding judicial coherence within such a system requires a continuous “dialogue” not only between different courts in a single country, but also between national courts of different countries, between the European Patent Office (EPO) and national courts, between the EPO and the UPC, between national courts and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and between the UPC and the CJEU.
The research question is to what extent the establishment of the UPC contributes to a dialogue between patent courts, the EPO and the CJEU. The paper reconstructs the concept of coherence into internal v. external and horizontal v. vertical coherence within the scope of multilevel governance and institutional change.
