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Self-Citation in Federal Circuit Opinions

Patent – Patently-O 2026-11-05

by Dennis Crouch

Judges on the Federal Circuit cite their own prior opinions about twice as often as their colleagues cite those same opinions.

What I did here was analyze about 2000 FedCir opinions (2021-2026); extracted a list of their cited-authorities and then looked at the opinion author of the prior precedent.  The chart below shows the comparison -- Across the opinions, about 10% of the citations are to the opinion-author's own prior opinions.  This is about 2x the rate at which the rest of the court cites those same opinions.

Bar chart: Federal Circuit judges' citations to their own prior opinions make up about 10% of their citations to earlier Federal Circuit opinions, compared with about 5% expected if they cited those opinions at the rate other judges do.

The extra-cites are tied to opinion-authorship - not the panel.  Each appeal is heard by three judges, but typically only one writes the opinion.  When the two non-authors later cite that opinion, they do so at about the same rate as the rest of the court. Thus, a judge also cites opinions they wrote about twice as often as opinions for cases they heard but did not author.  One additional quirk here - A good percentage of the extra-cites are directed to a small number of opinions that a judge cites again and again.

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