Stabilising Competence and Continuity in the UPC: <i>Roku v. Dolby/Sun</i> and Art. 87(2) UPCA

Abstract The transition of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) from London to Milan has emerged as a defining institutional stress test of the Court’s resilience and its relationship to the wider EU legal framework. The decision Roku v. Dolby/Sun is one of the leading early appellate rulings to address this transition. It treats the ‘bring it into line’ power as capable of addressing an implementation obstacle created by factual impossibility. This preserves operability while raising a boundary question about executive amendment authority within a treaty-based court. This article proposes a structured test for Art. 87(2), grounded in the UPCA’s safeguard logic, to distinguish continuity measures that remove implementation obstacles from changes that alter treaty-level institutional choices. It suggests that the Milan amendment can be defended on defined criteria while offering a principled basis to resist normalised executive treaty change under the language of continuity.