Raymond T. Chen
How Judge Chen decides
Patterns drawn from this judge's own signed orders. Every observation links to the order it came from.
What persuades
In obviousness he holds a lone prior-art reference to a demanding standard: where a single reference is the only evidence of obviousness, it must actually enable a skilled artisan to make the claimed invention. A reference whose performance parameters depend on materials that do not exist is legally non-enabling and cannot, by itself, render a claim obvious.
“If a skilled artisan cannot make Knip's engine, a skilled artisan necessarily cannot optimize its power density.”
He reads statutes as written and will not let a judge-made doctrine override a clear statutory grant: obviousness-type double patenting, an equitable doctrine, cannot cut off a patent-term extension that Congress validly authorized by statute.
“We agree and accordingly affirm.”
Procedural preferences
He holds parties to raising their arguments before the tribunal below. A claim-construction theory never presented to the examiner or the reviewing board is forfeited on appeal, because the iterative examination process puts the burden on the applicant to offer a saving construction in the first instance.
“Whereas forfeiture is the failure to make the timely assertion of a right, waiver is the “intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right.””
But he draws the forfeiture line with care. A party does not forfeit an argument for appellate review merely by declining to re-raise it in an optional request for rehearing before the agency, because that step is not required to preserve the point.
“We thus hold that a party's choice to not re-raise an argument in the party's request for rehearing to the Board does not, in and of itself, forfeit the argument for review by this court.”
Cautions
He requires more than possibility to support an inherency finding. A review board cannot hold a claim obvious by assuming a prior-art reference necessarily contains an unstated feature when the reference discloses other, more plausible ways of operating; a mere possibility that the feature is present is not substantial evidence.
“While it is possible that Woodhill's system utilizes an unstated Binary Object Identifier lookup table to locate binary objects of a previous version of a file that is going to be restored (column 17 of Woodhill), mere possibility is not enough.”
He guards against narrowing claims beyond what the specification supports. Absent clear disclaimer or disavowal, a court should not read a limitation into a claim term that would exclude embodiments the specification discloses -- doing so is reversible error.
“We normally do not interpret claim terms in a way that excludes embodiments disclosed in the specification—we only do so amidst clear disclaimer or disavowal.”
Signed rulings
A grounded sample of orders signed by this judge, with the verbatim dispositive language.
“For the foregoing reasons, we reverse the Board's determinations of unpatentability as to claims 4 and 7 of the '969 patent and claims 61-62 and 110-11 of the '703 patent.”
“For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the Board's determinations of unpatentability as to all claims.”
“The Board's decision is affirmed.”
“For the foregoing reasons, the Board's decision is affirmed-in-part, vacated-in-part, and remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
“For the reasons set forth above, we reverse the Board's decision finding claims 3 and 16 of the '751 patent unpatentable as obvious.”
“We therefore reverse the Board's finding of obviousness over Woodhill in view of Stefik.”
“For the reasons stated, we affirm the Board's decision upholding the rejection of claims 1-9, 11, 14-17, 19, and 20 of the '765 application.”
“For the foregoing reasons, we reverse.”
“For the reasons below, we affirm.”
“We affirm both the appeal and cross-appeal.”
“We affirm all three Board decisions.”
“For the reasons stated above, we reverse the district court's judgment as a matter of law with respect to the asserted claims of the '275 patent.”
Put Judge Chen's record to work
Ezel drafts and answers grounded in this exact profile: how Judge Chen actually rules, not a generic AI guess.
Opens in Ezel Pro. Every answer is grounded in Judge Chen's own signed orders and cites them.