Appeal No. 2001-0552
Application No. 09/277,412
appellant did not separately argue the merits of these rejections apart from claim 1, it was
unnecessary to repeat them in the answer. Such is not the case. Any rejection that an
examiner intends to maintain on appeal should be expressly included in the statement of
the rejections in the answer. While under certain circumstances we might remand an
application to the examiner to expressly state for the record whether or not a rejection not
repeated in the answer was being maintained, we decline to do so in this case because
we consider the examiner’s reliance on Habdas to be fundamentally flawed.
Claim 1
The preamble of claim 1 states that the claim is directed to “[a] door (10) for the bed
of a pickup truck, said bed including a tailgate and a pair of sidewalls, said door enclosing
said bed when the tailgate (14) is horizontal . . . .” In that the body of claim 1 makes clear
that the claimed “door” comprises a plurality of components, including “a door panel,” “a
pair of elongated members,” and “means for restricting rotation of said door panel,” we
consider the term “door” in the preamble of claim 1 to denote a “door assembly” rather
than simply a door. Moreover, while the preamble language “a door for the bed of a
pickup truck” (emphasis added) seems to indicate that the claim is
directed to a door per se, the body of the claim positively recites that the elongated
members which constitute a component of the claimed “door” are secured to the tailgate
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