Finesse Wireless LLC v. AT&T Mobility LLC, et al.

Despite sometimes highly technical subject matter, federal courts have always trusted lay juries to resolve patent disputes, including by evaluating expert testimony. That has been the rule since the Patent Act of 1790, which the First Congress passed and President Washington signed even before the States ratified the Seventh Amendment and its no-reexamination mandate in 1791. And deference to juries in patent cases was also the touchstone in every regional circuit before Congress created the Federal Circuit in 1982, in a statute that did not (and could not) change that constitutional norm. But as numerous commentors—including the United States —have observed, the Federal Circuit has since claimed the authority to second-guess a jury’s evaluation of expert credibility on the basis of a cold appellate record, and overrule jury verdicts based on its own assessment of the expert testimony. The question presented is: Whether a purported inconsistency in the testimony of an expert witness is an issue of credibility for the jury to resolve, as every regional circuit holds, or whether it instead supplies a basis for judgment as a matter of law, as the Federal Circuit held below and routinely holds in other cases.