About aop.onl

Welcome to Ali on Patents. This is how the treatise I wrote in 2007, The Law of Patents — With a Special Focus on Pharmaceuticals in India, exists today. It has changed not only in its content but also in the way in which you receive and read it. The treatise has broken away from the material and production confinements that bind its text, its pages and its distribution. What you have before you is a treatise that grows, and hopefully grows beyond me, that accommodates every possible nuance in the law that a practitioner needs and that caters to the multifaceted audience that patent law has — the patent lawyer, the patent agent, the judge, the law professor, the law student, the pharmacy student, the in-house counsel, the inventor and many more. So, welcome, and I hope you find it useful.

How the record is made

Ali on Patents is made of two kinds of pages, one presenting the primary source, the case law in an understandable way, and the other containing the commentary on those cases.

Case pages carry extracts of what a court said. They are built from the judgment itself: the words inside the quotation marks are the court's own, taken from the court's record, and connected with the barest possible words so that the page reads as a continuous record. Nothing on a case page is a summary of the judgment in someone else's words, and nothing is added to it that the court did not say. Each page records the court, the bench, the date of the judgment and its citations, states in a single sentence what the case decided, and says whether the decision still stands. Every case page is reviewed before it is published.

Doctrine pages carry the law on a single issues or a set of connected issue, and they are written by me. Each opens with the question a practitioner actually asks and answers it in one sentence before the page explains itself, so that a reader in a hurry gets what is in the page. The paragraphs are numbered, and the numbers do not change.

The two kinds of page are connected to each other: a case page lists the doctrines the judgment bears on and a doctrine page lists the cases it rests on. Every mention of a case anywhere in the record is a link to that case's own page.

The record is kept current. When a judgment is delivered, it enters the record as a case page, and the doctrine pages it touches are revised. A doctrine page says when it last changed, and a paragraph, once numbered, keeps its number: a paragraph inserted between 12 and 13 becomes 12A, and a paragraph that is withdrawn leaves its number behind.

Cite this record

Every page on this site carries its own citation, and you will find it near the top of the page, with a button that copies it.

The form is the name of the page, the name of this record and the page's address:

Novartis AG v Union of India, Ali on Patents, www.aop.onl/novartis (accessed on 21 September 2026).

Writ Jurisdiction in Patent Matters, Ali on Patents, www.aop.onl/writ-jurisdiction (accessed on 21 September 2026).

To cite a particular passage of a doctrine page, add its paragraph number — "para 12", or "paras 12–14".

Write for yourself

Dear Treatise Writer,

You may be at the threshold of a legal career, wondering what you should do with the vast expanse of time that lies ahead and worrying about what AI models can do, better than you, in the blink of an eye.

Publishing houses are known for asking authors to write for them. But LexCampus, the publisher behind aop.onl, is asking you to write for yourself, knowing full well that you will turn out to be the biggest beneficiary of your writing. In the article I wrote, Lawyer as Treatise Writer, you will learn about the lives of three lawyers who published their first books in their early thirties and launched their careers without a godfather. Mr. Datar attended one of Mr. Palkhivala's budget speeches and came away resolved to become a tax lawyer, to follow in his footsteps, and in time to write a treatise of his own. Working with Mr. Datar gave me the same resolve, and my treatise on patent law, which today exists online as Ali on Patents, is its result.

I may never get the chance to meet you personally and tell you how this one act — of choosing a domain and committing to write a treatise on it — can forge an identity that sets you apart in an age of machine-generated text, but I am hoping the linked article will do the job for you. So, please take the time to read this article and write to me on LinkedIn. I am looking forward to reading what you write.

Feroz Ali