What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
BELLAVANCE v. FRANK MORROW CO., Inc.
No. 3914.
Circuit Court of Appeals, First Circuit
March 17, 1944.
Harold E. Cole, of Boston, Mass., for appellant.
Nathaniel Frucht, of Providence, R. I., for appellee.
Before MAGRUDER, MAHONEY, and WOODBURY, Circuit Judges.
WOODBURY, Circuit Judge.
After our opinion in the above case was handed down on February 4, 1944, the plaintiff seasonably filed a petition for rehearing.. On February 24 we denied this petition. On March 3 the plaintiff filed a motion in which he asked us to reconsider our denial of his petition for rehearing for the reason that the decision of the Supreme Court in Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. et al. v. Ray-O-Vac. Co., 64 S.Ct. 593, in practical effect overruled Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84, 91,. 62 S.Ct. 37, 86 L.Ed. 58, the case upon which we and the district court heavily relied in concluding that the claims of the plaintiff’s patents were invalid for lack of invention. He says that the Goodyear case reverses the past trend of the Supreme Court toward an ever stricter application of the standard of invention.
The argument is invalid because it fails to take into account the difference in the way the question of invention was presented to the Supreme Court by the two cases cited above.
In the Cuno case the Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a conflict between decisions of the Second and Seventh Circuit Courts of Appeals on the question of the validity of the claims in suit, and it therefore necessarily could not apply “the well-settled rule that the concurrent findings of the lower courts on questions of fact will be accepted by this court unless clear error is shown”, but instead had itself to give “consideration to the question as to which of the decisions upon this question of fact [the question of invention], in the light of the prior art, is based upon the sounder reasoning.” Thomson Spot Welder Co. v. Ford Motor Co., 265 U.S. 445, 447, 44 S.Ct. 533, 534, 68 L.Ed. 1098; Sanitary Refrigerator Co. v. Winters, 280 U.S. 30, 36, 50 S.Ct. 9, 74 L.Ed. 147.
In the Goodyear case, however, the Supreme Court did not grant certiorari to resolve conflicting decisions below, but granted the writ to review an affirmance by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit of a district court decree holding certain claims of a patent valid and infringed. In this situation a majority of the court decided that the case was not strong enough to justify setting aside the concurrent findings of the two courts, district and circuit court of appeals, to the effect that the claims in suit were valid in that they disclosed an exercise of the faculty of invention. What it did in the Goodyear case, therefore, does not indicate that it is receding from the strict application of the standard for invention established in the Cuno case, which was not mentioned in the Goodyear opinion. What the cases cited above indicate is that the question of invention is one of fact, and that the Supreme Court will treat it as such and reverse only for clear error when it grants certiorari in the absence of conflict below, but that when there is conflict below and the Supreme Court in consequence can apply the standard of invention either strictly or liberally, it will apply the standard strictly. The situation may be unfortunate in that it leads to the unequal application of the patent law—a relatively trifling contribution may eventually obtain the protection of a patent while a more important one may not, depending upon whether or not there is a conflict of view between circuits—but this is not a problem for us to cope with. The most that circuit courts of appeals and district courts can do is what we and the court below have done here, that is, apply to the best of our ability the standard as we think the Supreme Court would apply it if a conflict between circuits should arise and certiorari should for that reason be granted. As the law now stands this is the only way we and the district courts can aid in obtaining a uniform application of the patent law. In the Goodyear case there is a statement by three of the dissenting Justices, quoting Mahn v. Harwood, 112 U.S. 354, 358, 5 S.Ct. 174, 6 S.Ct. 451, 28 L.Ed. 665, decided in 1884, that the question of invention is not one of fact at all but one of law to be decided by the courts. This is not in accord with the categorical statement in the Thomson Spot Welder Company case, supra, decided in 1924, that: “The question whether an improvement requires mere mechanical skill or the exercise of the faculty of invention, is one of fact; and in an action at law for infringement is to be left to the determination of the jury.” See also Hazeltine Corp. v. General Motors Corp., 3 Cir., 131 F.2d 34, 37 and cases cited. But, as I attempted to point out, I now think inadequately, in Hanovia Chemical & Mfg. Co. v. David Buttrick Co., 1 Cir., 127 F.2d 888, 889, this statement of the minority is in accord with judicial behavior in a great many cases. However, since a majority of the court in the Goodyear case obviously treated the question of invention as one of fact, as we did in the case at bar, we see no reason here to do more than advert again to the confusion in the law with respect to the nature of the question of patentable invention.
The motion to reconsider the plaintiff’s ' petition for rehearing is denied.
See also Williams Mfg. Co. v. United Shoe Machinery Corp., 316 U.S. 364, 62 S.Ct. 1179, 86 L.Ed. 1537.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "natural persons"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0