Opinion ID: 694395
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the special responsibility of the federal circuit

Text: 405 The Federal Circuit is responsible for establishing consistent national law in its areas of assigned subject matter. The court early in its existence took note that patent cases were only one of many areas of commercial dispute, only one of many areas of intellectual property dispute, that are tried in the district courts. We have striven to assure that unnecessary burdens are not placed upon the district courts of the nation by virtue of the separate path of appellate review of patent cases. We acted to assure that the same procedures would apply in the trial of patent cases as in other civil actions. See, e.g., Allen Organ Co. v. Kimball Int'l, Inc., 839 F.2d 1556, 1563, 5 USPQ2d 1769, 1774 (Fed.Cir.) (for matters not unique to patent law the procedural law of the regional circuit applies in patent trials), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 850, 109 S.Ct. 132, 102 L.Ed.2d 104 (1988). Thus the litigation process that served other civil disputes also served in patent litigation. Today's ruling, with its departures from the rules of evidence, its changed standards of deference and review, its conflict with established jury and bench procedures, challenges the principle on which this comity was based. 406 Patent cases are not unique in their usage of specialized terms and words of art, in their reliance on technologic or scientific evidence, in their dependence on findings of technologic fact. Evidentiary conflicts with respect to technology and science arise in a variety of cases; and the conflicting testimony of expert witnesses is ubiquitous. Trial judges have extensive experience in assuring a fair trial, and finding, within human limitations, the truth. 12 Today this court severs patent cases from all others, requiring different (and uncertain) procedures at trial, taking unto ourselves a different, and uncertain, appellate role. 407 It is the responsibility of the appellate court to assure that the law is correctly stated. The rules of patent law include an ever-enlarging body of nuance and clarification, flowing from twelve years of Federal Circuit jurisprudence and the rich history on which we have built. This court has undertaken the fine-tuning of the law, appropriate to the importance of technology in today's world. Much of this fine-tuning relates to new fields of science and technology (computers, biotechnology, materials); but it also relates to traditional concepts of patent law as applied to modern technologic and commercial needs. 408 The appellate role is to apply these principles in wise implementation of the policy of the law, as litigants probe the grey areas that test conflicting policy considerations. The appeal is not designed for de novo finding of the facts. I doubt the practical feasibility of the majority's holding that this court will construe the meaning of technical terms and words of art without benefit of the trial experience. It is of course appropriate for this court to be alert to methodologies of resolution of disputes that involve science and technology. The trial of scientific/technologic disputes was explored, for example, in the Report of the Carnegie Commission, Science and Technology in Judicial Decision Making (1993); the Report of the Brookings Institution, Charting a Future for the Civil Jury System (1992); and in ongoing studies and Reports of the Federal Judicial Center. However, in this complexity of problems and solutions, it is an illusion to think that patent litigation difficulties can be resolved by turning factual issues into matters of law and assigning them to the Federal Circuit. 409 The deference that appellate courts must give to the trial process is fundamental to the efficiency, and the effectiveness, of the judicial system. It implements the two-tier litigation right, and provides stability to the trial process while preserving appellate authority for the law, its policy and its purposes. The court's decision today denies the critical values of the trial, and moves the Federal Circuit firmly out of the juridical mainstream.