Court Opinion

ID: 9636428
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:28:28.599568+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:45.663060
License: Public Domain

EDGERTON, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I agree with the opinion of Judge Morris in the District Court. Hatch v. Ooms, (Dorsey v. Ooms), D.C., 69 F.Supp. 788.
The term disbarment, though convenient, is not exact. The orders of the Patent Office and the District Court do not forbid appellant to hold himself out as a lawyer, advise clients, and appear in courts. They exclude, him from practice before -the Patent Office.
It is immaterial that appellant did not write the so-called Clarke article and that the article did not contain false statements. It contained statements of opinion. Appellant represented it to the Patent Office as the disinterested work of Clarke. This representation was false and appellant knew it was false.
This false representation was highly material. As appellant himself says, “It was Clarke’s name that gave [the article] its status.” As the Supreme Court has said, the article “should have stood or fallen under the only title it could honestly have been given — that of a brief in behalf of Hartford, prepared by Hartford’s agents, attorneys, and collaborators.” Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. v. Hartford-Empire Co., 322 U.S. 238, 247, 64 S.Ct. 997, 88 L.Ed. 1250. The record of the present proceedings in the Patent Office contains the following affidavit, which the appellant executed in 1941: “Sometime in the spring or early summer of 1926, Mr. Roswell F. Hatch of the Hartford-Empire Company furnished me with a copy of a manuscript for an article entitled ‘Introduction of Automatic Glass Working Machinery; How Received by Organized Labor’, which was later published in the National Glass Budget for July 17, 1926, under the signature of William P. Clarke. I read the said manuscript and made some slight suggestions as to its verbiage. * * * At my request, a copy of the National Glass Budget containing the said article, authenticated by an affidavit of the publisher, was obtained and filed in the record of the above-identified Peiler application.”
On May 20, 1926, Hatch wrote to the appellant: “I fear I may have to go out to Toledo ¿gain to get Clarke to show some speed in this matter and perhaps to supervise what he publishes. I think he understood just what we want published, but he might unintentionally destroy some of the propaganda which we planned. I will see that you get a copy of some Journal in which this article appears when it comes Otlt* ^ ^ **
In the present proceedings in the Patent Office appellant admitted he had represented the article to the Office as the disinterested work of Clarke.
I think the proceedings were properly conducted. I think appellant’s fraud was fairly charged, proved, and found. I think the proof conclusive and the result just. The public and social interests in discouraging the fraudulent procurement of patents seem to me to outweigh appellant’s interest in his reputation and practice. However, that question is not before us. Where no error of law is involved, we have no authority to substitute our opinions for those of the Patent Office and the District Court. If the evidence of fraud, which I think conclusive, was so much as substantial, we must uphold their action, unless we are prepared to rule as a matter *416of law either that fraud in procuring a patent is too trivial to be “gross misconduct” or that success in concealing fraud for many years creates a prescriptive right to exemption from its consequences.