Right to a Jury Trial in Patent Validity / Revocation

by Dennis Crouch

Oil States Energy Services, LLC, v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC., now pending before the Supreme Court raises one important question:

Issue: Whether inter partes review … violates the Constitution by extinguishing private property rights through a non-Article III forum without a jury.

In June 2017, the Supreme Court granted certiorari and briefing is expected to continue through November 2017.

One amicus group did not wait till their filing deadline but instead has preemptively filed a brief “in support of neither party” even before any of the party briefs have been filed. Professor Tomás Gómez-Arostegui has focused on IP legal history for the past decade joined with British legal history scholar Sean Bottomley to establish several basic historical points:

Records from the 18th century are unequivocal and demonstrate that juries decided validity questions (including novelty) at several stages of the life of a patent. Juries were tasked with determining validity during infringement litigation, whether initiated at law or in equity; during court proceedings for revoking patents; and sometimes during patent prosecution. For a time, the Privy Council could also revoke patents, but it last did so in 1779. . . .

[READ THE BRIEF: 16-0712 ac H Tomas Gomez-Arostegui]

A primary thrust of the brief is to challenge the conclusions made by Mark Lemley in his article, Why Do Juries Decide if Patents are Valid?, 99 Virginia L. Rev. 1673 (2013).  The brief “corrects recent misconceptions on the subject, including those
appearing in [the Lemley] article relied upon by the parties.”

Fairly silly way to conduct business, but the constitutional permissiblity of the AIA Trial regime will depend upon whether revocation of patent rights were handled by jury trials in England around the time the Bill of Rights was adopted.  As the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, “The right of trial by jury thus preserved is the right which existed under the English common law when the Amendment was adopted.” Balt. & Carolina Line, Inc. v. Redman, 295 U.S. 654 (1935).  Although its fairly complex, the basic questions are (1) is revocation a common-law question (as opposed to one of equity) and if so (2) was it handled by a jury?   This is where Prof. Gómez-Arostegui steps in, writing:

  • In infringement actions: “the validity of a patent (if contested) was always decided at law, regardless of where the plaintiff initially filed. Moreover, the law courts would always try the case before a jury unless the parties had [otherwise] stipulated.”
  • In injunction actions filed in the Court of Chancery, the court would generally force the parties to file a separate common law action in order to permit the jury to resolve validity.
  • “[J]uries regularly decided the following issues related to validity: (1) whether the invention was new; (2) whether the patentee was the actual inventor of the purported invention; (3) whether the invention was useful; (4) whether the specification accurately described the claimed invention; and (5) whether the specification enabled a person working in the relevant art to construct the item described in it.”
  • “In a recent article, Professor Lemley argues that an ultimate or overarching issue of validity existed in the late 18th century that was ‘not itself a question
    of fact,’ but was instead a question of law. . . . Given the significance of this assertion, and the fact the Respondent has already relied upon it, it requires close inspection. In short, Lemley is incorrect and he cites no authorities that support the proposition.”
  • Patent revocation via writ of scire facias did operate via the Court of Chancery.  However, according to the brief here, “The Court of Chancery always sat as a law court in these instances and always sent issues of fact related to validity to the King’s Bench for a jury trial.” “Notably, scire facias did not require fraud or inequitable conduct, as the Federal Circuit claims [in Lockwood].”

One big gap for Gómez-Arostegui is with regard to the Privy Counsel who “could also revoke patents” including when “not new.”  The last revocation in this manner was 1779 on an issue of national security.  There are, however, no records of any petitions filed after 1780 and contemporary writing suggest that the revocation process moved entirely to scire facias.   The brief suggests that, if it were available, parties would have continued to push through the Privy Counsel because scire facias was so expensive and complicated.

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Now, lets say that the Supreme Court buys the notion that patent validity was a question of law requiring a jury trial, there is still another line of important Supreme Court precedent saying that “the Seventh Amendment is generally inapplicable in administrative proceedings, where jury trials would be incompatible with the whole concept of administrative adjudication and would substantially interfere with the . . . . [agency’s] role in the statutory scheme.” Curtis v. Loether, 415 U.S. 189, 194-95 (1974), quoted in Greg Reilly, The Constitutionality of Administrative Patent Cancellation (2017).