Parties Again Ask the Federal Circuit to Follow the Law and Issue an Opinion in PTO Appeals
Patent – Patently-O 2021-03-01
In a recent article, Judge Hughes was quoted as saying that he does not personally look at petitions for rehearing that stem from R.36 no-opinion judgments by the Federal Circuit.
Hughes said if the panel affirmed without an opinion, he puts the petition down and waits to hear from his clerks if it’s worth considering. If the panel wrote a nonprecedential decision without a dissent, he may flip through the table of contents to make sure he’s not missing anything.
But the only en banc petitions Hughes said he reads seriously are the precedential decisions, particularly with dissents. “Those are the only ones that are going to be en-banc-worthy,” he said.
Perry Cooper, Full Court Patent Review Bids Often ‘Waste of Time,’ Judge Says. In many ways, these no-opinion judgments are the shadow docket of the Federal Circuit without the usual full-court or expositive guardrails of ordinary appellate practice.
Before 1989, the Federal Circuit and its predecessor courts (going back 100+ years) wrote an opinion in each and every appeal of a patent case from the Patent Office. Now, about half of the cases are decided without opinion. Back in 2010, this represented fewer than 20 cases per year, many of which were pro se and ex parte. By 2019, more than 120 R.36 no-opinion judgments were issued in PTO cases, most of these were in hotly litigated inter partes reviews. In their article, Paul Gugliuzza and Mark Lemley looked at one area of law – patent eligibility – and concluded that the court was subtly shifting the law through its R.36 practice. Gugliuzza and Lemley, Can a Court Change the Law by Saying Nothing?, 71 Vanderbilt Law Rev. 765 (2018).
In a number of cases, parties have petitioned the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit for a hearing on the issue — arguing as I did in my 2017 article that 35 U.S.C. 144 requires the court to issue an opinion when reviewing an appeal from the Patent Office. So far, no court has agreed to even hold such a hearing.
In WaterBlasting v. Iancu, the petitioner is taking this same approach (I previously wrote about the patentee’s en banc request here.) In its new responsive briefing, the USPTO focused on general principles of appellate procedure that, by “longstanding tradition” permit the appellate courts to “establish their own procedures concerning when to issue opinions.” While I agree with this general principle, the USPTO failed to consider or work through the competing longstanding tradition in the patent context noted above or the statutory history on point.
One thing that I like about the Gov’t brief is that it lists many of the unsuccessful petitions to the Supreme Court on this issue:
See, e.g., Fote v. Iancu, 140 S. Ct. 2765 (2020); Kaneka Corp. v. Xiamen Kingdomway Grp., 140 S. Ct. 2768 (2020); Specialty Fertilizer Products, LLC v. Shell Oil Co., 138 S. Ct. 2678 (2018); Shore v. Lee, 137 S. Ct. 2197 (2017); Concaten, Inc. v. AmeriTrak Fleet Solutions, LLC, 137 S. Ct. 1604 (2017); Cloud Satchel, LLC v. Barnes & Noble, Inc., 136 S. Ct. 1723 (2016); Hyundai Motor Am. v. Clear with Computers, LLC, 134 S. Ct. 619 (2013); Kastner v. Chet’s Shoes, Inc., 565 U.S. 1201 (2012); White v. Hitachi, Ltd., 565 U.S. 825 (2011); Max Rack, Inc. v. Hoist Fitness Sys., Inc., 564 U.S. 1057 (2011); Romala Stone, Inc. v. Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., 562 U.S. 1201 (2011); Wayne-Dalton Corp. v. Amarr Co., 558 U.S. 991 (2009); Tehrani v. Polar Electro, 556 U.S. 1236 (2009).
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Federal Circuit Continues to Remain Silent about its R.36 Opinions