Court Opinion

ID: 9843253
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:31:29.774214+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:18.453017
License: Public Domain

BRYSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Having been a member of the panel that decided Regents of the University of California v. Eli Lilly & Co., 119 F.3d 1559, 43 USPQ2d 1398 (Fed.Cir.1997), I write to make a single point with regard to the court’s decision in that case. Lilly has been criticized as departing from prior law by applying the written description requirement for a purpose other than to police priority. Setting aside the question whether the disclosure requirement imposed in Lilly was unduly stringent, a point that Judge Rader addresses in his concurring opinion, I do not believe that Lilly constituted a departure from prior law when it applied the written description requirement in a non-priority context.
In re Ruschig, 54 C.C.P.A. 1551, 379 F.2d 990, 154 USPQ 118 (1967), held that 35 U.S.C. § 112, paragraph 1, contains a written description requirement that is separate from the enablement requirement found in the same paragraph. That interpretation of the statute may or may not have been correct — -there is something to be said for either side of that question of statutory construction. But there is no question that Ruschig and subsequent decisions have held that written description and enablement are separate statutory requirements, and that written description is not simply a facet of enablement. Judge Rader acknowledges as much, but argues that as long as the Ruschig doctrine was confined to cases involving priority disputes, that reading of the statutory language worked no particular mischief, as it was simply redundant of the statutory prohibition against new matter in 35 U.S.C. § 132. The problem, as I see it, is that if it is correct to read section 112 as containing a separate written description requirement, it is difficult to find a principled basis for restricting that requirement to cases involving priority disputes. There is no language in section 112 that would support such a restriction, and I am unaware of any other basis for construing the statute in that fashion, unless we are simply to announce that the Ruschig cases will be tolerated, but must be limited to their facts. Put another way, if the Ruschig line of cases is sound as a matter of statu*1328tory construction, it is difficult to see why that construction does not apply equally in the Lilly non-priority context.
Perhaps the entire line of cases stemming from Ruschig is wrong, and perhaps we should at some point address that question en banc. I take no position on that issue at this juncture. I think it is worth pointing out, however, that the real question raised by Judge Rader’s statutory analysis is not whether Lilly was an unwarranted departure from the Ruschig line of cases, but whether that entire line of cases is based on a fundamentally flawed construction of 35 U.S.C. § 112, paragraph 1.