US Inventor

is non-profit organization that represents more than 13,000 inventors and small-business owners across America. Many of the organization’s members own patents and other intellectual property. US Inventor brings together the best and brightest innovators of today to help the best and brightest innovators of tomorrow. Promoting and defending the invention process and business methods involved in developing an idea, making a profit, and changing lives.

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Chenery doctrine another legal norm not respected by the CAFC

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court announced a “simple but fundamental rule” of administrative law: “that a reviewing court, in dealing with a determination or judgment which an administrative agency alone is authorized to make, must judge the propriety of such action solely by the grounds invoked by the agency.” Chenery II, 332 U.S. at 196 (emphasis added). Thus, an agency’s “action must be measured by what [the agency] did, not by what it might have done,” SEC v. Chenery Corp., 318 U.S. 80, 93–94 (1943) (Chenery I), so if the agency’s “grounds are inadequate or improper, the court is powerless to affirm the administrative action by substituting what it considers to be a more adequate or proper basis,” Chenery II, 332 U.S. at 196… Unfortunately, Chenery is yet another baseline legal norm that is not given due respect in the Federal Circuit. That court swims against the tide of Chenery’s expansion, enacting a restriction on its operation that dramatically reduces the rule’s scope.