• • Judge Pauline Newman sits on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handles Patent cases

    • She is turning 96 in June

    • She helped create the Federal Circuit in 1982 and then was appointed by Ronald Reagan to serve on the court in his first term (1984)

  • Her colleagues have accused her of misconduct and say she can no longer do her job

  • They opened up a Judicial investigation

  • She has sued her colleagues seeking to block there investigation into her fitness to hold office

    • and accused them of violating the constitution

  • The court is no longer assigning her cases

    • The court says this is justified by her backlog alone

  • They want her to undergo a medical exam

  • It doesn't seem to be ideologically motivated 

    • Newman is the most "patent friendly" and Moore is close behind

The Mess (all alleged)

• Newman says she was also stripped of her assistant, law clerk and office computer

  • The chief judge says that staffers chose to leave and that her inability to understand the situation shows her decline

• Some of her fellow judges have accused her of "paranoid" and "bizarre" behavior

  • Newman says her colleagues are the ones who have lost it

• When asked in March by Moore, the chief judge, to take lighter "senior" status or retire according to the chief judge she said she wouldn't because she was the only person who cared about the patent system and innovation policy

• Committee made up of Moore and two other judges expanded its investigation to include an allegation that Newman is refusing to cooperate

  • They have subpoenaed and deposed her clerks 

  • The committee's work has been made public (with redactions)

• According to the court documents she has been working on a highly reduced schedule

  • From June 2022 to March 2023 her case load was almost half that of the average active judge and 3.5 standard dev below the mean (participated in 60 cases compared to the average active judge participating in 116)

  • Literally 2.5 pages about how she takes way longer with a significantly lighter load

    • They came with receipts

• she mishandled a serious dispute between two staffers and took retaliatory measures against this person

PC: WashPost