The Unified Patent Court After Two Years: Between Constitutional Tension and Strategic Convergence

Abstract This opinion examines the Unified Patent Court’s first two years of operation, from June 2023 to June 2025, through a combined doctrinal and practice-oriented lens. The central question is whether the UPC has moved beyond its institutional launch to become a constitutionally persuasive and strategically coherent court within the wider European patent order. The answer is mixed. The Court has become operationally significant with remarkable speed; it has generated a substantial body of decisions, and altered litigation planning across Europe. Yet, an early success in filings is not the same as institutional settlement. The UPC remains structurally polyphonic: its governance model still raises non-trivial questions about judicial independence, especially because the public visibility of selection, disclosure and recusal safeguards remains uneven; its first-instance practice reveals enduring local procedural cultures; and its interfaces with the EPO and national courts continue to leave room for parallelism, timing games and internal forum shopping. The opinion argues that the UPC has not abolished fragmentation so much as internalised it. It concludes that the Court’s long-term legitimacy will depend less on raw case numbers than on three forms of discipline: (1) more transparent guarantees of independence, (2) stronger multi-level coordination, and (3) more confident engagement with EU law through Art. 267 TFEU.