Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf
Page Number: 59

12 

UNITED STATES v. ARTHREX, INC. 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

the  Constitution,  then  administrative  patent  judges  must
be inferior officers.  See Art. II, §2, cl. 2.  And if administra-
tive  patent  judges  are  inferior  officers  and  have  been 
properly appointed as such, then the Appointments Clause 
challenge  fails.  After  all,  the  Constitution  provides  that
“Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of . . . inferior 
Officers . . . in the Heads of Departments.”  Ibid. 

The  majority’s  new  Appointments  Clause  doctrine,
though,  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  validity  of  an  officer’s
appointment. Instead, it polices the dispersion of executive 
power among officers.  Echoing our doctrine that Congress
may not mix duties and powers from different branches into
one actor, the Court finds that the constitutional problem 
here is that Congress has given a specific power—the au-
thority to finally adjudicate inter partes review disputes—
to one type of executive officer that the Constitution gives 
to another.  See ante, at 21 (plurality opinion); see also, e.g., 
Stern v. Marshall, 564 U. S. 462, 503 (2011) (assignment of 
Article III power to Bankruptcy Judge); Bowsher v. Synar, 
478  U. S.  714,  728–735  (1986)  (assignment  of  executive 
power  to  a  legislative  officer).    That  analysis  is  doubly 
flawed. 

For one thing, our separation-of-powers analysis does not 
fit.  The Constitution recognizes executive, legislative, and 
judicial  power,  and  it  vests  those  powers  in  specific 
branches.  Nowhere does the Constitution acknowledge any 
such  thing  as  “inferior-officer  power”  or  “principal-officer 
power.”  And it certainly does not distinguish between these 
sorts of powers in the Appointments Clause.

And even if it did, early patent dispute schemes establish 
that  the  power  exercised  by  the  administrative  patent
judges here does not belong exclusively to principal officers. 
Nonprincipal  officers  could—and  did—render  final  deci-
sions in specific patent disputes, not subject to any appeal 
to a superior executive officer.  In 1793, Congress provided 
that resolution of disputes, where two applicants sought a