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Text: The Federal Circuit’s formulation is overly rigid. Under the standard crafted in Brooks Furniture, a case is “exceptional” only if a district court either finds litigation-related misconduct of an independently sanctionable magnitude or determines that the litigation was both “brought in subjective bad faith” and “objectively baseless.” 393 F. 3d, at 1381. This formulation superimposes an inflexible framework onto statutory text that is inherently flexible.

For one thing, the first category of cases in which the Federal Circuit allows fee awards—those involving litigation misconduct or certain other misconduct—appears to extend largely to independently sanctionable conduct. See ibid. (defining litigation-related misconduct to include “willful infringement, fraud or inequitable conduct in procuring the patent, misconduct during litigation, vexatious or unjustified litigation, conduct that violates Fed. R. Civ. P. 11, or like infractions”). But sanctionable conduct is not the appropriate benchmark. Under the standard announced today, a district court may award fees in the rare case in which a party’s unreasonable conduct—while not necessarily independently sanctionable—is nonetheless so “exceptional” as to justify an award of fees.

The second category of cases in which the Federal Circuit allows fee awards is also too restrictive. In order for a case to fall within this second category, a district court must determine both that the litigation is objectively baseless and that the plaintiff brought it in subjective bad faith. But a case presenting either subjective bad faith or exceptionally meritless claims may sufficiently set itself apart from mine-run cases to warrant a fee award. Cf. Noxell, 771 F. 2d, at 526 (“[W]e think it fair to assume that Congress did not intend rigidly to limit recovery of fees by a [Lanham Act] defendant to the rare case in which a court finds that the plaintiff ‘acted in bad faith, vexatiously, wantonly, or for oppressive reasons’ . . . . Something less than ‘bad faith,’ we believe, suffices to mark a case as ‘exceptional’ ”).

ICON argues that the dual requirement of “subjective bad faith” and “objective baselessness” follows from this Court’s decision in Professional Real Estate Investors, Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 508 U. S. 49 (1993) (PRE), which involved an exception to the NoerrPennington doctrine of antitrust law. It does not. Under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine—established by Eastern Railroad Presidents Conference v. Noerr Motor Freight, Inc., 365 U. S. 127 (1961), and Mine Workers v. Penning­ ton, 381 U. S. 657 (1965)—defendants are immune from antitrust liability for engaging in conduct (including litigation) aimed at influencing decisionmaking by the government. PRE, 508 U. S., at 56. But under a “sham exception” to this doctrine, “activity ‘ostensibly directed toward influencing governmental action’ does not qualify for Noerr immunity if it ‘is a mere sham to cover . . . an attempt to interfere directly with the business relationships of a competitor.’ ” Id., at 51. In PRE, we held that to qualify as a “sham,” a “lawsuit must be objectively baseless” and must “concea[l] ‘an attempt to interfere directly with the business relationships of a competitor . . . .’ ” Id., at 60–61 (emphasis deleted). In other words, the plaintiff must have brought baseless claims in an attempt to thwart competition (i.e., in bad faith).

In Brooks Furniture, the Federal Circuit imported the PRE standard into §285. See 393 F. 3d, at 1381. But the PRE standard finds no roots in the text of §285, and it makes little sense in the context of determining whether a case is so “exceptional” as to justify an award of attorney’s fees in patent litigation. We crafted the Noerr-Pennington doctrine—and carved out only a narrow exception for “sham” litigation—to avoid chilling the exercise of the First Amendment right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. See PRE, 508 U. S., at 56 (“Those who petition government for redress are generally immune from antitrust liability”). But to the extent that patent suits are similarly protected as acts of petitioning, it is not clear why the shifting of fees in an “exceptional” case would diminish that right. The threat of antitrust liability (and the attendant treble damages, 15 U. S. C. §15) far more significantly chills the exercise of the right to petition than does the mere shifting of attorney’s fees. In the Noerr-Pennington context, defendants seek immunity from a judicial declaration that their filing of a lawsuit was actually unlawful; here, they seek immunity from a far less onerous declaration that they should bear the costs of that lawsuit in exceptional cases.

We reject Brooks Furniture for another reason: It is so demanding that it would appear to render §285 largely superfluous. We have long recognized a common-law exception to the general “American rule” against feeshifting—an exception, “inherent” in the “power [of] the courts” that applies for “ ‘willful disobedience of a court order’ ” or “when the losing party has ‘acted in bad faith, vexatiously, wantonly, or for oppressive reasons . . . .’ ” Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. v. Wilderness Society, 421 U. S. 240, 258–259 (1975). We have twice declined to construe fee-shifting provisions narrowly on the basis that doing so would render them superfluous, given the background exception to the American rule, see Christiansburg Garment Co. v. EEOC, 434 U. S. 412, 419 (1978); Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., 390 U. S. 400, 402, n. 4 (1968) (per curiam), and we again decline to do so here.

Finally, we reject the Federal Circuit’s requirement that patent litigants establish their entitlement to fees under §285 by “clear and convincing evidence,” Brooks Furniture, 393 F. 3d, at 1382. We have not interpreted comparable fee-shifting statutes to require proof of entitlement to fees by clear and convincing evidence. See, e.g., Fogerty, 510 U. S., at 519; Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., 496 U. S. 384 (1990); Pierce v. Underwood, 487 U. S. 552, 558 (1988). And nothing in §285 justifies such a high standard of proof. Section 285 demands a simple discretionary inquiry; it imposes no specific evidentiary burden, much less such a high one. Indeed, patent-infringement litigation has always been governed by a preponderance of the evidence standard, see, e.g., Béné v. Jeantet, 129 U. S. 683, 688 (1889), and that is the “standard generally applicable in civil actions,” because it “allows both parties to ‘share the risk of error in roughly equal fashion,’ ” Herman & MacLean v. Huddleston, 459 U. S. 375, 390 (1983).