Opinion ID: 516267
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Bench Trials and Jury Trials

Text: 200 Courts and commentators generally have rejected proposals that modern juries should be limited to special verdicts of narrow historical facts and denied the verdict on the ultimate question. As discussed in Childress with respect to the question of negligence, it is the trier of fact who has seen the evidence and heard the witnesses and determined who is the ordinary person, and is best capable of determining what such a person would have done or should reasonably have done in the specific situation that existed. Childress, supra, at 141: 201 Treating negligence as fact is the usual course even among courts that call it a mixed law-fact issue apparently recognizing that whatever the policies supporting deference, negligence presents a classic example of applying a legal standard, normally reasonableness, to established facts in determining a conclusion of legal liability. 202 The Supreme Court has made plain that it is the jury that applies the legal standard of reasonableness. See, e.g., Wilkerson v. McCarthy, 336 U.S. 53, 62, 69 S.Ct. 413, 417-18, 93 L.Ed. 497 (1949): 203 We see no reason, so long as the jury system is the law of the land, and the jury is made the tribunal to decide disputed questions of fact, why it should not decide such questions as these [negligence] as well as others. 204 (quoting Jones v. East Tennessee R. Co., 128 U.S. 443, 445, 9 S.Ct. 118, 118-119, 32 L.Ed. 478 (1888)). 205 Precedent illustrates the analogous application, by the jury, of the legal standard of the person of ordinary skill to the facts of the prior art. See Parts I and II, ante. Whether classified as mixed law-fact, as law based on fact, or as ultimate fact, the question of unobviousness may be decided by the jury. When so decided, it is reviewed on the usual reasonable juror/substantial evidence standard. 6 206 The panel majority's proposed full and independent determination of the question of unobviousness does no damage if applied to review of a bench trial, wherein the district court's decision is accompanied by the detailed findings and conclusions of Rule 52(a). Childress, supra, at 194 explains that a judge's ruling after a bench trial involving interdependent questions of law and fact may indeed be reviewed more freely than a jury's verdict on the same issue: 207 That application of law to facts is the jury's job, and on appeal it is generally not questioned in the same way that a judge's findings on a bench trial appeal, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a), might be called mixed law-fact and then split into the component parts, with the law part going more freely to the reviewing court. In this way the law-fact issue in jury trials is more a process than a rude dichotomy. 208 In the process some issues called mixed law-fact in bench trials--and often reviewed more freely there--are unquestionably submitted to the jury. Negligence is the classic example.... [Emphasis in original, footnote omitted] 209 The standard of review of the jury verdict does not lose its requisite deference merely because a bench trial would be reviewed more freely. 210 Neither Constitution nor statutes preclude the courts from applying different rules to the findings of fact of trial judges from those applied to the findings of juries.... 211 Stern, Review of Findings of Administrators, Judges and Juries: A Comparative Analysis, 58 Harv.L.Rev. 70, 83, 86 (1944). 212 Thus the traditional role of the jury in patent cases was undisturbed by our holding in Panduit Corp., 810 F.2d at 1566-68, 1 USPQ2d at 1595-97, that unobviousness is a conclusion of law based on facts. Panduit did not eliminate decision of the ultimate question of obviousness by jury verdict, or change the standard of appellate review. Indeed, to hold otherwise would place us in direct conflict with the Seventh Amendment: a situation not intended by this court.