Supreme Court Denies Cert in Rapunzel Trademark Case

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by Rebecca Curtin, leaving in place a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) that barred her from opposing the trademark registration for “RAPUNZEL” for dolls and toy figures. The Court declined to review the CAFC’s holding that a consumer lacks the statutory entitlement to oppose a trademark registration under 15 U.S.C. § 1063 because such consumer interests fall outside the commercial zone of interests protected by the Lanham Act.

Curtin v. United Trademark Holdings, Inc. originated from a trademark application filed in November 2017 by United Trademark Holdings, Inc. (UTH) to register the term RAPUNZEL for dolls and toy figures. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examiner approved the application, and the mark was published for opposition in April 2018. Within the 30-day window, Rebecca Curtin, a law professor and an avid collector of fairy-tale dolls and toy figures, filed a notice of opposition. Curtin argued that the proposed mark is descriptive and generic, and fails to function as a trademark because Rapunzel is the name of a fairy-tale character known in various forms for hundreds of years. “No company should ever be able to be the only company that can call their doll Rapunzel, because Rapunzel is already in the public domain,” Curtin said in 2018.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) initially denied UTH’s motion to dismiss, finding that Curtin had sufficiently alleged a direct and personal stake in the outcome of the proceeding. However, after approximately two years of proceedings, the Board sua sponte bifurcated the case to focus first on Curtin’s entitlement to oppose the registration. Relying on the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., the Board dismissed the opposition. The TTAB concluded that a consumer does not fall within the zone of interests of the Lanham Act and that Curtin had not shown proximate causation.

Moreover, the CAFC unanimously affirmed the Board’s dismissal in May 2025, and the Federal Circuit found that the TTAB properly applied the zone-of-interests test from Lexmark in determining whether Curtin was entitled to oppose UTH’s registration. The CAFC held that the Board was right to conclude that Curtin’s interest as a doll collector and consumer entitled to market competition was too remote to fall within the zone of interests that can file for opposition proceedings under Section 1063. The CAFC further concluded that the intervening step of harm to sellers was fatal to a showing of proximate causation by a consumer such as Curtin, characterizing her alleged injuries as “downstream harms first suffered by a commercial actor.”

In her petition for a writ of certiorari filed in October 2025, Curtin argued that the CAFC split from the Third, Fifth, and D.C. Circuits on a fundamental principle of administrative law. Those circuits have held that judicially created standing doctrines, such as the zone-of-interests test, do not apply to administrative agencies. The petition asserted that the CAFC’s imposition of the standards applicable to plaintiffs in federal court on agency petitioners “flies in the face of the basic fact that agencies are not courts.” As a result of the CAFC’s decision, Curtin warned, “consumers are now wholly dependent on marketplace sellers to challenge deficient trademarks before the PTO.”

A conflict with Supreme Court precedent was also raised in the petition, noting that Lexmark addressed only the standards applicable to a plaintiff bringing a cause of action in federal court. The concept of a cause of action is employed specifically to determine who may judicially enforce statutory rights, and nothing in the Court’s cases suggests that a cause of action includes administrative proceedings. Furthermore, a blanket bar against consumers participating in the administrative process is inconsistent with the Lanham Act, which has a core purpose to protect the ability of consumers to distinguish among competing producers.

In its brief in opposition filed in March 2026, UTH countered that the CAFC did not impose Article III standing requirements on the Board, but rather engaged in statutory interpretation as prescribed by Lexmark. The zone-of-interests test is not a judicially created prudential standing doctrine, but a framework for determining the scope of a legislatively conferred cause of action. The Lanham Act’s stated intent is to protect persons engaged in commerce against unfair competition, and Lexmark held that a plaintiff must allege an injury to a commercial interest in reputation or sales to come within the Act’s zone of interests. The assertion of a circuit split was also rejected, with UTH arguing that the cases cited by Curtin involved materially different statutes and different administrative schemes, none of which addressed the Lanham Act. Adopting Curtin’s position would carry far-reaching consequences for the administration of the trademark system, UTH warned, transforming the Board into a forum for generalized public complaints and inviting “meddlesome parties” to act as “self-appointed guardians of the purity of the Register.”

In the reply filed on March 24, 2026, Curtin responded that UTH applied the zone-of-interests and proximate-causation tests without truly grappling with their applicability to administrative proceedings. Curtin noted that UTH nowhere confronted the Court’s explanation that a cause of action is a judicial determination of rights and obligations. The reply also challenged UTH’s contention that the outcome would have been the same under the pre-Lexmark Ritchie standard, pointing out that the Board had initially found, under Ritchie, that Curtin satisfied the entitlement standard and changed position only after adopting the Lexmark framework.