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Opinion of the Court
We concede that the Court also used language that could be read as setting forth a court/court standard of review. It said, for example, that the
"Patent Office [decision] must be accepted as controlling upon that question of fact . . . unless the contrary is established by testimony which . . . carries thorough conviction. . . . [I]f doubtful, the decision of the Patent Office must control." Id., at 125 (emphasis added).
It added that the testimony was "not . . . sufficient to produce a clear conviction that the Patent Office made a mistake." Id., at 129 (emphasis added). But the Court did not use the emphasized words today; it used those words more than 100 years ago. And its reasoning makes clear that it meant those words to stand for a court/agency review standard, a standard weaker than the standard used by "an appellate court in reviewing findings of fact made by the trial court." Id., at 123.
The opinions in the 89 CCPA cases, cataloged in the Appendix to this opinion, reveal the same pattern. They use words such as "manifest error" or "clearly wrong." But they use those words to explain why they give so much, not so little, deference to agency factfinding. And, their further explanations, when given, indicate that they had court/ agency, not court/court, review in mind.
In nearly half of the cases, the CCPA explains why it uses its "manifest error" standard by pointing out that the PTO is an expert body, or that the PTO can better deal with the technically complex subject matter, and that the PTO consequently deserves deference. In more than three-fourths of the cases the CCPA says that it should defer to PTO fact-finding because two (and sometimes more) PTO tribunals had reviewed the matter and agreed about the factual finding. These reasons are reasons that courts and commentators have long invoked to justify deference to agency factfinding. See Universal Camera, 340 U. S., at 496-497 (intraagency
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