Rules versus Standards: Competing Notions of Inconsistency Robustness in Patent Law

This Article applies a new paradigm from the field of computer science — inconsistency robustness (IR) — in order to analyze the competing ways in which the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit craft patent law standards and rules. The IR paradigm is a shift from the previous paradigm of inconsistency elimination. The new IR paradigm recognizes that modern, complex information systems must perform notwithstanding persistent and continuous inconsistencies. The focus on IR encourages system designers to recognize the reality of persistent inconsistency when building robust systems that can perform reliably. Legal systems regularly process a great deal of complexity and inconsistency, and thus, by necessity, have always been structured to be inconsistency robust. Accordingly, applying insights from the formal IR paradigm is helpful in analyzing the effective functioning of legal systems. This Article is the first legal article to formally utilize IR in analyzing the legal system. By using IR analysis, the article identifies and analyzes a previously under analyzed persistent pattern within patent law. Specifically, the article shows via example in five separate areas of patent law that the Federal Circuit and Supreme Court repeatedly diverge on the adoption of rules versus standards in patent law. The Article shows that this pattern can be explained by viewing the two courts as rational systems administrators attempting to maintain an inconsistency robust patent system from each of their perspectives as systems administrators. The Article further shows that if the courts adopt a holistic view of IR, they can craft more optimal patent law by taking into account the costs and benefits of the law to all participants and administrators of the patent law system.