Federal Circuit Nothing But Punks For SCOTUS, Says Critic

The Federal Circuit is showing too much deference to the Supreme Court’s flawed precedent on patent law, Gene Quinn, patent attorney and founder of IPWatchdog, writes. Quinn comments on a recent speech given by Judge Alan Lourie of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit at the American Intellectual Property Lawyers Association’s annual meeting. “For many years … the Supreme Court wasn’t much interested in patent cases,” said Judge Lourie, then he named several majority opinions he wrote which were reversed by the Court. “Commentators have said the Supreme Court has disciplined our court or that it has cutback patent rights. … [T]he Supreme Court is at the top of the judicial heap, and we have got to follow its precedence as best we can.”

However, Quinn argues, “there is a difference between following precedent and channeling the Supreme Court, as the Federal Circuit seems to be doing.” The Supreme Court “does not like patents,” Quinn says, and is “simply not technically sophisticated enough to handle patent issues. – They contradict their own previous rulings without overruling previous decisions. They paint with the broadest of brushes, make ridiculous and incorrect statements of law about poorly written claims on disclosures that are thin at best.” Therefore, “The overbroad statements of the Supreme Court should not be blindly followed and applied to cases dealing with innovations of a wholly different character.”