"Justice John Marshall Harlan earned the title "The Great Dissenter" of the 1800s. Judge Pauline Newman holds that title for the millennium era - with over 300 dissents in precedential cases in just the final two decades of her tenure alone. To an extent that existing scholarship has only begun to capture, Newman's voice of disagreement defined the Federal Circuit's internal dialogue on patent law."
"From 2005 through 2022, the Federal Circuit's dissent rate in precedential opinions averaged about 19%. In some years it ran higher: the 2011-2013 period saw rates of >25%, the highest sustained period of disagreement in the dataset, driven by the doctrinal upheaval surrounding both Alice and the America Invents Act. In other years the rate dipped to around 13-14%. But it never once fell below double digits."
"In 2023, the year Newman was suspended from the bench, the rate dropped to 10%. In 2024, it fell to 6%; and in 2025 the rate was even lower. The Federal Circuit's dissent rate is settling into a new equilibrium roughly one-third of what it was for the prior two decades."
Judge Pauline Newman earned the title "The Great Dissenter" for the modern era, filing over 300 dissents during her final two decades on the Federal Circuit. An empirical analysis of nearly 5,000 precedential opinions from 2004 to early 2026 demonstrates Newman's profound influence on the court's patent law dialogue. From 2005 through 2022, the Federal Circuit maintained a dissent rate averaging 19%, with peaks exceeding 25% during 2011-2013. Following Newman's suspension in 2023, the dissent rate dropped to 10%, then fell to 6% in 2024 and lower in 2025. This dramatic decline reflects Newman's outsized contribution to the court's internal disagreements, fundamentally altering the Federal Circuit's culture toward consensus.
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