By long-standing judicial precedent, laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are excepted from eligibility for patent protection. The Supreme Court recently promulgated a two-part test that excludes from eligibility subject matter that is directed to any of these judicial exceptions unless there is something “significantly more,” namely “invention” or an “inventive concept.” The test is intended to bar patent protection that would preempt use of any of the judicial exceptions themselves.“Preemption,” however, is related to two earlier, and now obsolete, doctrines of “new use” and “aggregation” in that all three derived from eighteenth-century English case law that viewed inventive methods to be applications of principle within the meaning of eligible “manufactures” under the Statute of Monopolies. When the Patent Act of 1952 recast the language of its predecessor statutes and earlier jurisprudence into separate provisions under Title 35 of the United States Code (U.S.C.) for eligibility (§101), novelty (§102) and non-obviousness (§103), “new use” and “aggregation” were no longer considerations of eligibility because, as stated most succinctly by Judge Learned Hand, “the definition of invention [is] now expressly embodied in §103.” For the same reason, the doctrine of “preemption” and its attendant “two-part test” should follow suit.