Court Opinion

ID: 9492038
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:30:46.386791+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:04.697271
License: Public Domain

BRYSON, Circuit Judge,
with whom Circuit Judge PAULINE NEWMAN joins, concurring.
While I concur in the opinion of the court in this case, I write separately to explain why I believe the step-plus-function issue that Judge Rader addresses in his concurring opinion is not properly before this court.
Neither party objected at any point to the district court’s characterization of the claim at issue in this case as subject to 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶ 6. Neither party objected to the jury instruction on that issue, and neither party has questioned that instruction on appeal. When a jury instruction is not objected to on a timely basis at trial, the legal issue incorporated in that instruction may not be raised on appeal, absent egregious circumstances. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 51; Hoechst Celanese Corp. v. BP Chemicals Ltd., 78 F.3d 1575, 1581 (Fed.Cir.1996). That principle applies with special force when the parties do not raise any claim of instructional error on appeal. See Pentax Corp. v. Robison, 135 F.3d 760, 762 (Fed.Cir.1998).
*852It is true, as Judge Rader states, that claim construction is a question of law. But parties waive legal issues as well as factual questions whenever they fail to preserve them for appeal or to raise them before the appellate court. We have no duty, with respect to claim construction or any other non-jurisdictional legal issue, to address questions the parties have not preserved for appeal and have not presented as grounds for challenging or supporting the judgment of the trial court.
The requirement that appellate courts normally limit themselves to issues that the parties have preserved below and raised on appeal serves important interests of both trial and appellate processes. The trial process benefits from a preservation-of-error requirement because it frees trial courts to focus on the factual and legal issues the parties identify as being in dispute, without having to worry that a misstep on an issue not disputed or objected to by the parties will result in a reversal. The requirement benefits the appellate process by letting appellate courts focus on issues that the trial courts have expressly ruled on and that the parties have briefed on appeal, rather than having to venture opinions regarding issues that have never been briefed, argued, or even adverted to in the course of the proceedings.
In this case, for example, the question whether the claim at issue is a step-plus-function claim is a difficult one, to which Judge Rader has devoted several pages of analysis, some of which breaks new ground. That analysis may be correct, but I would feel more comfortable embracing it if it had been the subject of a decision below and had been tested by briefing and argument before us, rather than emerging for the first time in the course of our disposition of the appeal.
The appellant's position on the main issue in this case is that it does not infringe claim 1 of the `622 patent because latex cannot serve as an "adhesive tack coating for adhering the mat to the foundation over the foundation surface." In order to resolve that issue, we need only decide that the term "adhesive tack coating," as used in the claim, does not exclude latex; we are not required to decide whether the language of claim 1 of the `622 patent invokes section 112, paragraph 6. I therefore concur in the court's opinion, which decides the issue of liability without addressing the question whether the trial court erred in characterizing the claim in this case as a "step-plus-function" claim.