Court Opinion

ID: 9476410
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:55:12.688693+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:18.042370
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring and dissenting.
I join in the judgment of the court and in part (3) of the court’s opinion. I think the district court’s opinion was preposterous and must be reversed. It fails, among other things, to take into account the acts of the government as purchaser of the M-16. The United States could have obtained the M-16 rifle from its inventors and developers, as a sole source, or could have opened its procurement up to competition, breaking any monopoly derivable from United States patent law, state trade secret law, or otherwise. Leesona Corp. v. United States, 599 F.2d 958, 220 Ct.Cl. 234, 202 USPQ 424, cert. denied, 444 U.S. 991, 100 S.Ct. 522, 62 L.Ed.2d 420 (1979). How does a supplier do wrong in doing what its customer wants, when the customer is the United States?
I am unable to join parts (1) and (2) because, with all respect, I think they deal with the jurisdictional problem in an incorrect manner. If it is true we lack jurisdiction (part 1), whence do we derive authority to do anything other than return the case once again to the Seventh Circuit, which has jurisdiction, if we do not?
I would reach the same result by a different route. Ever since Congress enacted the Tucker Act a century ago, Ch. 359, 24 Stat. 505 (1887) (current version at 28 U.S.C. § 1491), there has existed a situation where the judicial power of the United States has been exercised in part by courts having jurisdiction within a single region over multiple subject matters, and in part by courts having nationwide jurisdiction over more limited subject matters. Such a partitioning has always meant a high degree of likelihood of conflicting claims to jurisdiction (or conflicting denials of it) along the lines of demarcation, in the borderline cases. They represent traps for the unwary, causes of added cost and delay in *1565the disposition of litigation, and sometimes even discredit for the judiciary. An example, long antedating the Federal Courts Improvement Act, is Amell v. United States, 384 U.S. 158, 86 S.Ct. 1384, 16 L.Ed.2d 445 (1966), in which the Supreme Court, reversing the Court of Claims, held that Congress had thought of civilian sailors on government-owned and operated vessels as civil servants who happened also to be seamen rather than seamen who happened also to be civil servants; thus their wage claim should be enforced under the Tucker Act, not the Suits in Admiralty Act. Numerous as such cases have been, we may suppose many more instances lurk in the interstices to illustrate again once more that only one law is universal: Murphy’s Law. When the express language of the statutes does not provide answers, perhaps the legislative history will. When both are silent, the supposition, as in Amell, that Congress must have thought so and so, is pretty much a legal fiction. How much a fiction it was in Amell, Justice Harlan’s able dissent will show. If Congress thinks, it leaves its thought recorded, but it could not possibly think of all the problems the future will bring. United States v. Hohri, — U.S. -, 107 S.Ct. 2246, 96 L.Ed.2d 51 (1987), is a more recent example of the problems which must ever arise under the Federal Courts Improvement Act or any other legislation along the same lines. It is more realistic to say that Congress relies on the good sense and good will of the judges to solve such problems when they arise, as they surely will, to make jurisdictional law using their own experience, study, and reflection, and their sense of what Congress sought to do, to reach some reasonable solution. If it would not do such violence to custom, I would even go so far as to suggest that two courts differing about where jurisdiction lies, though it must lie in one or the other, should actually confer to agree, if possible, on what they should do.
It is not uncommon for two federal courts to make conflicting claims to the same subject matter. It is less common for each to assert the baby belongs on the other’s lap. That is what we have here. It appears to me courts ought to accord a decent respect to the first fully articulated view about a question of this kind. That is the Seventh Circuit’s view here, as our decision that preceded it was unpublished and gave no reasons. If the legislative intent was not expressly stated, and cannot be divined from legislative history all pointing one way, I think the first appellate court that speaks should be followed, unless its decision is obviously indefensible: the kind of decision so bad it would not rate as “law of the case.” That we, if writing on a clean slate, would write differently, is not ground enough to reject the Seventh Circuit’s conclusions here if they are ones that reasonable judges could arrive at. If we approach our task that way, the absurd result of each court returning the case to the other can be avoided.
I do not think the Seventh Circuit’s decision in this case is one no reasonable judge would have made. It struck me as quite persuasive when I first read it. Now I know a powerful counter argument is possible, because I have just read one, but I do not see this case as open and shut for either conclusion.
What happened in the district court seems to be that the judge adopted, on summary judgment, a line not pointed out in the pleadings of either side. It seems obvious to me that a new “well-pleaded complaint,” written by one who wished to call up the court’s ultimate conclusion, is the one we must postulate. As the Seventh Circuit points out, the “well pleaded complaint” of the cases is not necessarily the actual complaint. It is the supposititious complaint that would have supported the relief sought. Such a complaint here would support jurisdiction under section 1338. It asserts a right or privilege that would be defeated by one or sustained by an opposite construction of the patent laws. Beghin-Say International Inc. v. Rasmussen, 733 F.2d 1568, 1570, 221 USPQ 1121, 1123 (Fed.Cir.1984). I believe such a “well-pleaded complaint” here would have used the patent law offensively. The hypothetical pleader would complain of a breach of the patent law by Colt’s failure to publish *1566an enabling disclosure so the pleader could make an M-16 rifle. (This is absurd, but it is the ground the court went off on.) This enabling disclosure would have included all the “trade secrets.” Therefore, the court must require Colt now to do what it ought to have done earlier, i.e., make the secrets available now. In deciding whether this is a claim to a right under the patent laws, we must not be misled by its sheer preposterousness, or its novelty. The fact the district court’s decision was based on a mere “argument” is not decisive if the court could and should have called for an amended complaint. If the suit started as one under the antitrust laws, it was now one no longer, or not solely. It has become one to enforce a right allegedly created by the patent statute. The antitrust laws could not be the source of a complaint that the specification disclosures were inadequate, and the whole antitrust case collapses if the disclosures were in fact all the patent law required.
If this analysis is not the only possible one, I think it cannot be called frivolous, or absurd, or “clearly wrong.” It does not require me to agree that our first decision rejecting jurisdiction was, as the Seventh Circuit said, “clearly wrong” either. I do not see how they knew this if they did not know its reasoning. We must choose. But it seems a little unnatural to me to treat the “well-pleaded complaint” rule as requiring us to leave uncorrected a decision under the patent laws as destructive to the rights of patentees as the one we review here.