Court Opinion

ID: 9487267
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:12:06.932134+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:10.501845
License: Public Domain

PLAGE R, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
This case raises two significant issues. The first is whether, as a predicate for our review, there was a proper decision of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. The second, which we can reach only if the answer to the first is yes, is how to dispose of the case on its merits. The first issue, the question of our jurisdiction over this appeal, is particularly troubling since it implicates the Commissioner’s overall power and status within the agency, and particularly vis-a-vis the examining corps., and because the statutory provision, 35 U.S.C. § 7, is so remarkably vague and incomplete. I join the majority’s conclusion that we have jurisdiction in these particular circumstances; I write to sharpen the focus on specific administrative law issues which I believe to be important to an understanding of the case, and to explain my disagreement with the reasoning found in the opinions which dissent on the question of our jurisdiction.
On the merits of the appeal, there is no doubt that the Board erred as a matter of law in refusing to apply § 112 ¶ 6 as we have instructed. I would have sent the matter back to the Board with instructions to do it right, but I recognize the validity in Lord Salisbury’s famous dictum — if he had had more time, he might have delegated the work, but as he was pressed, he had to do it himself.1 Accordingly, I join the majority’s disposition of the merits, and in particular Judge Rich’s skillful chasing out of some of the less useful judicial accretions regarding patentability under § 101.
On first — or even second — reading, the action of the Commissioner in reconstituting *1578the Board in order to produce a result more to his liking seems beyond the pale. There is no express statutory warrant for it, nor has the Commissioner exercised his rulemak-ing power to purport to grant himself explicit authority to do such a thing. Furthermore, ‘court-packing’ has never caught on in this country as a prerogative of the Executive.
Closer study of the applicable law, however, leads to a different conclusion. The statute defines the overall membership of the Board: “The Commissioner, the Deputy Commissioner, the Assistant Commissioners, and the examiners-in-chief shall constitute the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences.” 35 U.S.C. § 7(a) (1988). It gives the Commissioner authority to designate those particular members who shall constitute the Board in any given case: “Each appeal and interference shall be heard by at least three members of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, who shall be designated by the Commissioner.” 35 U.S.C. § 7(b). And it gives “the Board” exclusive authority to grant rehearings: “Only the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has the authority to grant rehearings.” Id.
The regulations add nothing of help. After decision by the Board, “A single request for reconsideration or modification of the decision may be made if filed within one month....” 37 C.F.R. § 1.197(b) (1993).2 Neither the regulations or the statute explain which “Board” is being referred to: is it the full Board with membership now over forty people? the original Board designated by the Commissioner to hear the initial appeal? or the Board designated to consider the rehearing? The regulations do not even track the statute; they refer to “reconsideration,” whereas the statute talks about “rehearings.”
The question before us, however, is not whether the statute could have been better drafted, or whether the Commissioner could or should have written more explicit regulations. The question is much narrower, and more basic — does this court have subject matter jurisdiction over the cause here on appeal. Our statute (28 U.S.C. § 1295(a) (1988)) directs that we shall have exclusive jurisdiction
(4) of an appeal from a decision of—
(A) the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences of the Patent and Trademark Office....
Again the reference to “the Board,” nowhere defined. The question, then, is, do we have a “decision of the Board” before us.
Judge Mayer, in his dissent, says no. He analogizes the Board to a court, and vests it •with virtually complete independence from guidance, including policy guidance, from the Commissioner. The Board is imbued with “court-like qualities.” Among these is freedom from outside influence in rendering decisions, including undue influence by the Commissioner. It follows then that Congress could not have intended the Commissioner to have the kind of power he claims to reconstitute the Board on a reconsideration. If the premise is correct, the conclusion indeed follows. I suggest, however, that the premise is not correct because it does not take into account the fundamental differences between administrative and judicial decision-making.
Courts, especially courts created under Article III of the Constitution, have a unique role — they stand as equal partners with the Executive and Legislative Branches, and, subject only to those restraints imposed by the Constitution, are wholly independent in their judicial function from the other two branches. Their mission is to ensure that the law is carried out in a just and proper way, consistent with the Constitution and statutes of the land.
Administrative judges and boards are quite a different thing. They stand as part of the agency which they serve, and represent the decisional authority of the official who is the administrative head of the agency. Their mission is, within the law, to promote and further the mission of the agency. The particular function they serve may be characterized as ‘quasi-judicial,’ but this must be understood within the context in which they function.
*1579Congress has delegated to various Executive Branch agencies — or more accurately, to the officials who head the agencies — a wide range of functions, aimed at enabling the agencies to perform their missions. In addition to purely administrative functions (the internal management of the agency), agency heads typically are given rulemaking authority — the power to promulgate legislative-type rules to fill in gaps left by the Legislature, and adjudicative authority — the power to decide, as an administrative matter, the application of the agency’s rules to individual cases.
An agency head could not today perform effectively all these functions without being able to delegate responsibility to various officials within the agency. In the case of the adjudicative function, a complex of individual- and board-adjudicators, like Topsy, has ‘growed up.’3 They come with various titles: some agencies have ‘administrative judges,’ some have ‘administrative law judges,’ some use other titles. (‘Hearing examiner’ was a popular title before the Civil Service Commission in 1972 bestowed the appellation of ‘judge’ on many of these positions.) Adjudicative boards of various kinds, with various memberships and various duties, have been established, generally by legislation. Some board members are referred to as ‘judge,’ some are not.
Whoever they are, and however many of them there are in any given agency, they all have a common role — they stand in the shoes of the agency head and carry out specified duties which Congress has assigned to that agency. This does not mean that these agency adjudicators simply do what the agency head tells them. As a practical matter, no agency head has time or opportunity to monitor the daily work of these employees. Furthermore, the institutional distance between them has an important value — it serves to remove the adjudicative function from any improper political or personal bias that might otherwise infect the process if left exclusively in the hands of one individual. Another important value is to avoid having the agency activities of investigation, prosecution, and adjudication combined in the same person or office.4
This separation is particularly important in fact-finding: the adjudicator is entitled to independence, i.e., freedom from interference, in determining the facts of the case. But ‘independence’ in the administrative adjudicative function is not independence from the policies and program of the agency, the policies and programs of which are uniquely the responsibility of the agency head.
The dissent’s parallel between agency adjudicators and courts demonstrates the inaptness of this analogy. For example, he states that “the Commissioner holds a position on the board similar to a chief judge of a court, who has only one vote on a case, but has additional administrative authority.” Slip op. at 11. But a chief judge of an Article III court is not selected for that position by virtue of any particular talent for the job, or because of any particular policy-making skills; indeed, a chief judge is not ‘selected,’ but inherits the job by virtue of a mathematical combination of seniority and longevity.5
By contrast, the appointment of the head of a major administrative agency is a matter of considerable political and professional concern, and requires both Presidential selection and nomination and Senate confirmation for that particular post. The person selected is expected to have important skills in the role *1580to be played, and equally importantly is expected to support the President’s program and must be acceptable to the concerned policy interests reflected in the Senate.
The relative roles of a chief judge and an agency head reflect these differences. A chief judge has a purely administrative function by virtue of the office; policy making and adjudication lie elsewhere. The agency head, in this case the Secretary of Commerce, assisted by the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks who holds office as an Assistant Secretary of Commerce, has, subject to direction from the President, all three of the functions and powers described. In this light, the majority’s view of the statute governing the Board’s organization and powers is more consistent with the proper role and authority of the Commissioner, who acts for the Secretary, than is the dissent’s.
There no doubt are limits to the Commissioner’s power over Board adjudications. The Commissioner is not free to unduly interfere with individual adjudications — that is, the application of established rules to independently found facts of a case. But this is not such a case. In this case the Board decision at bottom turned on an important issue of statutory interpretation — what is patentable subject matter under § 101 of the 1952 Patent Act. The Commissioner had a quite different view of how § 101 should be interpreted than did the Board that initially heard the case. While the Commissioner has various vehicles at his command for announcing official interpretations of the agency’s organic legislation and for enunciating agency policy, there is nothing unusual about using the adjudicative process for that purpose.6
The Commissioner has an obligation to ensure that all parts of the agency, including agency boards and adjudicative officials, conform to official policy of the agency, including official interpretations of the agency’s organic legislation. Otherwise the citizenry would be subject to the whims of individual agency officials of whatever rank or level, and the Rule of Law would lose all meaning in the administrative law context. If Congress intended to transfer policy choice to the subordinate officials who constitute the normal membership of a Board, and remove from the agency head the fundamental responsibility for agency policy direction, it would have to make explicit such an extraordinary procedure before a court should countenance it.7
Judge Schall in his dissent also says no to the question of whether we have before us a decision of “the Board.” He bases his conclusion on an analysis different from that of Judge Mayer. Applying classic literal or ‘plain meaning1 statutory analysis, Judge Schall concludes that the Board’s reconsideration decision was invalid because the PTO panel was not the Board intended by the statute: “the Board” is all forty-plus members described, and nothing less. The technique of legal analysis employed by the dissent is certainly legitimate, and based on sound precedent. If it applies here, Judge Schall’s treatment is hard to fault. However, I do not find the statute ‘plain’, and am hard pressed to discern its ‘meaning’ in this context.
One could ask how a literal reading of the statute is called for when the statute, literally read, is literally incomplete. The statute states that “only the Board ... has the authority to grant rehearings.” And then it stops. It does not tell us, or even hint at an *1581answer to: when a rehearing is granted, who appoints the rehearing Board? Must the rehearing Board be the full Board (which, per Judge Schall, must grant the rehearing), or can it be less than the full Board? Does the Commissioner have a supervisory role to play? A wide range of possible permutations comes readily to mind.
Equally troubling is the impact this ‘plain meaning’ interpretation will have on our pri- or cases (as well as future ones). A preliminary canvas of ex parte appeals to the Board in the FY 1990 — FY 1993 period (Oct. 1, 1990 — Sept. 30, 1993) indicates that the Board decided 17,132 appeals. Of these, 1,551 involved a “reconsideration” decision by the Board. The available data do not reveal whether these reconsideration decisions were always by the same board that rendered the initial decision, but presumably that would be true in most if not all of these cases. It is presumably also true that these rehearings were granted pursuant to the existing PTO regulations, which do not involve the Board as the authorizing entity.
If we were to adopt the plain meaning analysis offered by this dissent, what are we to think about all such prior rehearing decisions? A government act that is ultra vires is void, which means the defect in the appeal is not waived simply because the parties failed to raise it. Since there is no compelling reason to adopt such a radical result — as I say, I find the statute’s plain meaning not so easily discerned — I conclude that the outcome called for by Judge Schall is not warranted. I would also note that under this analysis, the Commissioner by subsequent regulation could not clarify the circumstances and manner in which he intended to exercise this reconstitution power, since he would be without authority to exercise it.
I conclude that Chief Judge Archer in his opinion comes closer to the answer to today’s jurisdictional puzzle. Although there remains opportunity for attack should the Commissioner again reconstitute a board the way he did here — does he violate his own regulations, is there a due process question, what is the exact scope of the legislative grant of authority — that attack has not here been launched. A court must attend to its own jurisdiction, and the parties cannot grant jurisdiction by their consent. Nevertheless, the absence of challenge removes peripheral and secondary issues, and leaves only the basic jurisdictional question. I am unpersuaded by the arguments my colleagues make against jurisdiction. And while I do not necessarily agree with all that is said about it by those in support of jurisdiction, I do agree that there is sufficient basis in law for this court to conclude that we have before us on this record a decision of “the Board;” I concur in the court’s decision to proceed to address the merits.

. The regulations also provide that an applicant is entitled to have his case reconsidered by "the Board” under 37 C.F.R. § 1.197(b) when “the Board” makes a new rejection of an appealed claim. See 37 C.F.R. § 1.196(b)(2) (1993).

. There are currently almost 1,200 Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) employed by 30 federal agencies. In addition, there are other administrative officials who do work similar to that of AUs; these "non-ALJs” conduct almost 350,000 cases annually, involving over 2,600 presiding officers, either on a full-time or part-time basis. See Paul Verkuil et al.. The Federal Administrative Judiciary 5-7 (1992), an exhaustive study of the federal administrative judiciary commissioned by the Administrative Conference of the United States at the request of the Office of Personnel Management.

. See Paul Verkuil et al., supra note 3, at 14-15.

. There is one exception among the chief judges: the chief judge of the Court of International Trade, an Article III trial court, is appointed to that office by the President. And of course the Chief Justice of the United States, who functions for the Supreme Court in a role not unlike that of a chief judge, is also appointed to that office.

. In the early years, adjudication was the principal method agencies used to promulgate policies. See Daniel J. Gifford, Adjudication in Independent Tribunals: The Role of an Alternative Agency Structure, 66 Notre Dame L.Rev. 965 (1991). The Administrative Procedure Act provided for the role of adjudications made on the record. See ch. 324, §§ 5, 7(d), Pub.L. No. 404, 60 Stat. 239, 241-42 (1946).

. It is worth noting that, in recent years, the examiners-in-chief are included with "all other officers and employees” who are appointed by the Secretary of Commerce upon the nomination of the Commissioner. Pub.L. No. 93-601, 88 Stat.1956 (1975). Prior to that they, along with the Commissioner and assistant commissioners, were appointed by the President with Senate confirmation. See, e.g., ch. 950, Pub.L. No. 593, 66 Stat. 792 (1952): "A Commissioner of Patents, one first assistant commissioner, two assistant commissioners, and nine examiners-in-chief shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Article III judges are neither appointed by or subject to removal by a chief judge.