Cite as: 535 U. S. 826 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
We do not think this option is available. Our task here is not to determine what would further Congress's goal of ensuring patent-law uniformity, but to determine what the words of the statute must fairly be understood to mean. It would be difficult enough to give "arising under" the meaning urged by respondent if that phrase appeared in § 1295(a)(1)—the jurisdiction-conferring statute—itself. Cf. Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, § 211(b)(2), 85 Stat. 749 (providing the Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals with exclusive jurisdiction over appeals "in cases and controversies arising under this title"). Even then the phrase would not be some neologism that might justify our adverting to the general purpose of the legislation, but rather a term familiar to all law students as invoking the well-pleaded-complaint rule. Cf. Coastal States Marketing, Inc. v. New England Petroleum Corp., 604 F. 2d 179, 183 (CA2 1979) ("The use of the phrase 'cases and controversies arising under' . . . is strong evidence that Congress intended to borrow the body of decisional law that has developed under 28 U. S. C. § 1331 and other grants of jurisdiction to the district courts over cases 'arising under' various regulatory statutes"). But the present case is even weaker than that, since § 1295(a)(1) does not itself use the term, but rather refers to jurisdiction under § 1338, where it is well established that "arising under any Act of Congress relating to patents" invokes, specifically, the well-pleaded-complaint rule. It would be an unprecedented feat of interpretive necromancy to say that § 1338(a)'s "arising under" language means one thing (the well-pleaded-complaint rule) in its own right,
Circuit's jurisdiction is "fixed 'by reference to the case actually litigated.' " 486 U. S., at 813 (quoting Brief for Respondent in Christianson v. Colt Industries Operating Corp., O. T. 1987, No. 87-499, p. 31). We held that the Federal Circuit's jurisdiction, like that of the district court, "is determined by reference to the well-pleaded complaint, not the well-tried case." 486 U. S., at 814.
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