The CCPA's Lasting Impact On U.S. Patent Law: Part 1

• Published date: 11 July 2022
• Law Firm: Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP
• Author: Ms Amanda Murphy, Caitlin E. O'Connell, Angeline Premraj, Emma N. Ng, Brady Nash, Stacy Lewis and Thomas Irving

The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA), which always sat en banc and was the predecessor to today's Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), developed a rich body of jurisprudence relating to U.S. patent law. Titans of the U.S. patent bar, such as Judge Giles Sutherland Rich, who was a co-author of the 1952 Patent Act, populated the CCPA and rendered those decisions.

The CAFC adopted all CCPA holdings as binding precedent in its very first decision, South Corp. v. U.S., 690 F.2d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1982):

This appeal is the first to be heard, and this opinion the first to be published, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, established October 1, 1982 by the Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982, Pub. L. No. 97-164, 96 Stat. 25.

The court sits in banc to consider what case law, if any, may appropriately serve as established precedent. We hold that the holdings of our predecessor courts, the United States Court of Claims and the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA), announced by those courts before the close of business September 30, 1982, shall be binding as precedent in this court.

Id. at 1369 (emphasis added).

Overturning CCPA holdings should, therefore, require either a decision by an en banc Federal Circuit, as indicated in South Corp., or a decision by the CCPA overruling the...