By Jason Rantanen
Last week the Federal Circuit issued two interesting orders in appeals from the USPTO. In the first, In re Zhu (Appeal No. 2021-1761), Sept. 13, 2021, the Federal Circuit vacated the decision of the PTAB and remanded the case to the PTO “for reconsideration of whether the claims are directed to an improvement in computer functionality, especially in light of this court’s recent case law.” (internal quotations and brackets removed). The context of this, according to Tiffany Hu, was the Federal Circuit’s 2020 Uniloc v. LG ruling together with the PTO’s own request for a remand “to permit further proceedings” – i.e: this was a patent eligible subject matter issue that the PTO decided to take another look at while the appeal was pending.
The second, In re Boloro (Appeal nos. 2019-2349, -2351, -2353), Sept. 16, 2021, was an order by the Federal Circuit remanding the case to allow Bolero to request Director rehearing of the final written decisions in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Arthrex, Inc., 141 S.Ct. 1970 (2021). The Federal Circuit had previously issued an order remanding the case for assignment to a different panel, its earlier remedy for the Constitutional appointments issue with patent judges. As Andrew Karpan recently wrote, this order extends the effects of Arthrex to ex parte appeals.
On their own, neither of these orders are that notable. They are nonprecedential orders that contain little more explanatory reasoning than a summary affirmance under Rule 36. On the other hand, they were enough for Law360 authors to write about.
What’s more interesting is that neither was posted to the Federal Circuit’s website. They’re only available in PACER. This is not itself all that unusual. Historically, dispositive orders like these would vanish into the ether – becoming what Merritt McAlister recently characterized as Missing Decisions. They are never published in reporters, including the Federal Appendix, and aren’t in the major research databases. Indeed, I didn’t find either of these decisions in Westlaw or Lexis when I searched yesterday afternoon. Yet, they are judicial decisions, and in an age where lawyers, judges and scholars have come to think that all law (or at least, all appellate decisions) is easily accessible, they highlight that it’s not.
In a forthcoming essay response to Professor McAlister’s Missing Decisions, I examine the one federal appellate court that for technical reasons McAlister didn’t include: the Federal Circuit. What I find is that the Federal Circuit is quite good about putting its opinions and Rule 36 summary affirmances on its website. But there are also a lot of missing decisions, which are concentrated in certain areas. This is concerning if our frame of reference for judicial decisionmaking is defined by what’s readily available on court websites and commercial legal databases.
Here are my main findings:
- Based on a comparison of docketed appeals filed between 2008 and 2018 to decisions posted to the Federal Circuit’s website, 45% of docketed appeals are decided in an opinion released on the court’s website, 17% are decided in a Rule 36 summary affirmance released on the court’s website, and the remaining 37% have neither an opinion nor Rule 36 available on the court’s website.
- The number of documents released by the court on its website are about the same as the number of documents available in the big commercial legal databases (Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg). This may be because, as McAlister describes, these sites tend to pull directly from the same pool that is posted to the court’s website or just collect directly from the court’s website.
- Taking a closer look at appeals filed in 2015, of the 497 docketed appeals without a terminating document available on the court’s website (31% of the total), a large portion involved voluntary dismissals by the appellant (303) or the parties jointly or dismissal for failure to prosecute (72). However, there were a moderate number of appeals dismissed for lack of appellate jurisdiction (31), transferred (23), and even decided by a merits order (16). None of these were released on the court’s website and when I looked for some of them in Westlaw and Lexis, they weren’t there either. All were designated as “nonprecedential.”
The bottom line is that when it comes to substantive merits decisions and decisions designated by the court as “precedential,” almost all of these appear to be on the court’s website. But there’s a host of other nonprecedential decisions–many dealing with jurisdictional issues–that aren’t. There are also decisions in petitions for writs of mandamus, which the court currently appears to mostly be releasing on its website although that hasn’t always been the case.
Given all this, my recommendation parallels that of McAlister: the Federal Circuit should release all dispositive orders on its website, not just decisions labeled as “opinions” or summary affirmances under Rule 36. This would be consistent with both its practice of releasing Rule 36 summary affirmances (which contain less judicial reasoning than most of the dispositive orders that it doesn’t release) and the overall goal of judicial transparency about decisions. And for those who think that having access through PACER alone is enough, Prof. McAlister and others have described in depth why that’s not the case.
There’s more in the essay itself, which also contains links to the data I used archived on the Harvard Dataverse. Here’s a link to the preprint of the essay: Missing Decisions and the Federal Circuit.
Thanks to Dmitry Karshtedt for calling these two Law360 articles to my attention. And here are copies of In re Zhu and In re Boloro that I pulled from PACER.
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