Giles Rich

He was the first patent attorney appointed to any federal court since Benjamin Robbins Curtis was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1851.

It was the first full revision of U.S. patent law since the Patent Act of 1870.

Giles Sutherland Rich (May 30, 1904 – June 9, 1999) was an associate judge of the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) and later on was a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), and had enormous impact on patent law.

Rich was born May 30, 1904, in Rochester, New York.

Rich was the son of Giles Willard Rich, a patent lawyer, and Sarah Thompson (Sutherland) Rich.

His father worked for a variety of clients, including George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company.

After his first year of high school his family moved to New York City, where he graduated from the Horace Mann School for Boys in 1922.

Rich received a Bachelor of Science degree from Harvard University in 1926 and a Bachelor of Laws from Columbia Law School in 1929.

and was admitted to the New York bar.

In the fall of 1929 he joined his father's law firm, Williams Rich & Morse, where he worked as a patent attorney until 1952.

In the 1940s, motivated by a prize competition, Rich authored a series of law review articles on patent practices and the anti-monopoly laws, and particularly, on contributory infringement and misuse.

The series is considered by many to be a classic in the field.

From 1942 to 1956, he was also a lecturer in patent law at Columbia University in its School of General Studies.

In 1947 he became part of a two-person committee to draft a new U.S. patent statute, all while continuing to practice law full-time.

His partner on the statute drafting committee was Pasquale Joseph Federico, the Examiner-in-Chief of the U.S. Patent Office.

He was very active in the work of the New York Patent Law Association, and eventually became its vice president in 1948 and 1949, and its president in 1950 and 1951.

Rich took an active role in the work of the New York Patent Law Association when it undertook to introduce and foster legislation to address the Supreme Court's Mercoid cases, which virtually destroyed the doctrine of contributory infringement.

After four years of work, Rich and Federico's draft statute was introduced in the Congress by Joseph Bryson (D-SC) in 1951.

From 1952 to 1956, he was in private practice at Churchill, Rich, Weymouth and Engel in New York City.

After passing both houses without substantial debate, as part of a "consent bill", it was signed into law by President Truman in 1952, to take effect in 1953.

He wrote opinions in which the court struck down prior rulings from the United States Patent and Trademark Office against the patenting of genetically engineered micro-organisms (essentially giving birth to the bio-tech industry) (In re Chakrabarty), software-implemented inventions (In re Diehr), and business methods (State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group), saying the inventions covered in those patent applications had a proper basis in the current patent statute (the 1952 Patent Act of which he was one of the principal drafters).

In re Diehr and especially State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group were highly controversial decisions.

Many in the academic and legal community thought that the cases were wrongly decided and examples of judicial activism on the basis of a pro-patentee agenda, and the legal reasoning utilized in these decisions has been severely criticized.

For example, in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group, Judge Rich justified his conclusion on the basis that the business method exception to patentability was abolished by the 1952 Patent Act.

However, this line of reasoning is contradicted by Judge Rich himself, among others.

He had earlier stated, in a law review article written not long after the passage of the 1952 Patent Act, that Section 101 of the Act denied patent protection to business methods, observing that the diaper service, "one of the greatest inventions of our times," was patent-ineligible because it was a business method.

Rich was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on May 17, 1956, to an Associate Judge seat on the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals vacated by Judge Noble J. Johnson.

He was confirmed by the United States Senate on July 19, 1956, and received his commission the same day.

Rich was initially appointed as a Judge under Article I, but the court was raised to Article III status by operation of law on August 25, 1958, and Rich thereafter served as an Article III Judge.

Rich also served as an adjunct professor of patent law at Georgetown University from 1963 to 1969.

In 1963, he was awarded the Charles F. Kettering Award from the Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Research Institute at George Washington University.

Judge Rich's judicial opinions were often notable for their colorful and memorable language.

For example, in one case in which a majority of the Federal Circuit judges were unwilling to accept as a binding precedent an earlier decision of that court with which he was apparently in sympathy, he said in dissent that they acted with "defiant disregard" of precedent and added: "[I]t is mutiny. It is heresy. It is illegal."

Judge Rich's judicial opinions include some of those most groundbreaking, influential, and controversial to modern U.S. patent law.

Rich was reassigned by operation of law to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on October 1, 1982, to a new seat authorized by 96 Stat.

25. At 95, he had become the oldest active federal judge in the history of the United States; he never took senior status, a time when judges typically assume a reduced workload and semi-retire.

His service terminated on June 9, 1999, due to his death.

The State Street decision was substantially overruled in the Federal Circuit's 2008 decision in In re Bilski.

The Supreme Court's decisions in the Bilski-Mayo-Alice trilogy even more definitively rejected the line of doctrine that culminated in the State Street decision.

Judge Rich was an outspoken critic of the Supreme Court and Justice Department when they took positions on patent law in opposition to those which he advocated.