Pauline Newman (born June 20, 1927) is an American lawyer and jurist formally serving as a U.S. circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. As of 2025, she is the longest-serving active federal judge, although she was suspended from her duties in September 2023 due to concerns about her productivity and cognitive ability, which she disputes.
Ranking among the most distinguished federal judges, she has been called "the heroine of the patent system", "the Federal Circuit's most prolific dissenter", and "the greatest ally to inventors with respect to [calling out] the ignorance of the [Federal Circuit], district courts, and at times even the Supreme Court".Daryl Lim, "I Dissent: The Federal Circuit's "Great Dissenter", Her Influence on the Patent Dialogue, and Why It Matters", 19 Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law (Summer 2017), Vol. 19, Iss. 4. Chief Judge Kimberly A. Moore commented of Newman that "many of her dissents have later gone on to become the law—either the en banc law from our court or spoken on high from the Supremes".NYU School of Law, Law Women Alumna of the Year: Judge Pauline Newman '58, YouTube (Feb. 19, 2013), Archived. Lynn Levine, Senior of Counsel in the Intellectual Property Group at Morrison and Foerster was the co-honoree.
Education and career Newman was born on June 20, 1927, in New York City, to Maxwell H. and Rosella G. Newman. Growing up during and in the aftermath of World War II, Newman "learned to fly planes, drive racecars and ride motorcycles". She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College in 1947, with a double major in chemistry and philosophy, followed by a Master of Arts from Columbia University in 1948. She "sought to be a physician, but changed her mind", receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry from Yale University in 1952. At the time, it was unusual for women to work in chemistry, and "no chemical firm would hire her except American Cyanamid". As the sole female research scientist employed by that company, "her bosses tried to force her into becoming a librarian until she threatened to walk out". She worked as a research scientist for American Cyanamid from 1951 to 1954, during which time she was issued patents for "colorful, dirt-resistant synthetic fabric she helped invent". In 1954, she "took her savings and bought a ticket on a boat to Paris, where she supported herself by mixing drinks on the Île Saint-Louis" for six months, until her funds ran out.
Later in 1954, Newman returned to the United States and started working for FMC Corp., receiving a Bachelor of Laws from New York University School of Law in 1958, and working as a patent attorney and in-house counsel, and for fifteen years (1969–1984) as director of the Patent, Trademark and Licensing Department. From 1961 to 1962 Newman also worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a science policy specialist in the Department of Natural Resources. She served on the State Department Advisory Committee on International Intellectual Property from 1974 to 1984 and on the advisory committee to the Domestic Policy Review of Industrial Innovation from 1978 to 1979. From 1982 to 1984, she was Special Adviser to the United States Delegation to the Diplomatic Conference on the Revision of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. Over her career, Newman has received honors including the Wilbur Cross Medal of Yale University Graduate School, and the Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Cooperation from the Pacific Industrial Property Association. In 1982, while serving on a presidential committee on industrial stagnation for President Ronald Reagan, Newman helped create the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She has also been a "Distinguished Professor of Law" as an adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law.
Federal judicial service On January 30, 1984, President Ronald Reagan nominated Newman to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated by Judge Philip Nichols Jr., who had assumed senior status on October 1, 1983. Newman was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 27, 1984, and received her commission the following day. Newman thus became the first judge appointed directly to the Federal Circuit, all of her predecessors having come to the court through the merger of the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals and the appellate division of the United States Court of Claims. Newman was also the only judge on the Federal Circuit who did not previously serve on a lower court.
Another judge of the Federal Circuit, Giles Rich, was the oldest active federal judge in the history of the United States when he died 10 days after his 95th birthday in 1999; Newman surpassed that record on June 30, 2022, but "remains an active judge" and has been described as "the court's institutional memory bank".
In 2013, Newman was honored by NYU Law Women as their law alumna of the year. In 2015, she endowed a lecture series on science, technology, and society, at her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College, with the inaugural lecture being delivered on April 2, 2015, by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute president Shirley Ann Jackson. That same year, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised Newman for inspiring women with "her intelligence, her diligence, her devotion to a very difficult area of the law".
A 2016 Law360 article stated that Newman "built her reputation as the appellate court's most prolific contrarian". A 2017 analysis of the impact of Newman's dissents has shown that her positions are often adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal. In 2018, she was selected to receive the American Inns of Court Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Award for Professionalism and Ethics. In October 2022, Newman endowed and initiated the Pauline Newman Program for Science, Technology and International Law at NYU Law. In remarks published in 2023, Federal Circuit Chief Judge Moore said that "there can be no doubt that Judge Newman is the heroine of the patent system".
In September 2023, Newman spoke at the National Vaccine Law Conference at George Washington University, advocating greater consideration of the effect of patent law on the advancement of technologies like vaccines, stating that "we must understand not just how the present law applies, but also to understand if it's anything less than optimum, it's in our hands".
In August 2026, Representative Darrell Issa, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, introduced a bill in the United States Congress to designate courtroom 201 in the Federal Circuit's Howard T. Markey National Courts Building as the "Pauline Newman Courtroom".
Jurisprudence
Newman has written many important opinions about law of patents in the United States. In Arrhythmia Research Technology, Inc. v. Corazonix Corp.,958 F.2d 1053 (Fed. Cir. 1992). she wrote an opinion for the panel finding that the use of an algorithm as a step in a process did not render the process unpatentable. In In re Recreative Technologies Corp.,83 F.3d 1394 (Fed. Cir. 1996). she wrote the opinion finding that the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences exceeded its authority when it considered a claim of obviousness in the reexamination of a patent previously held by the examiner not to be obvious with respect to the references cited. In Intergraph Corporation v. Intel Corporation,Intergraph Corporation v. Intel Corporation, 195 F.3d 1346 (Fed. Cir. 1999). she highlighted the right of a patent owner to refuse to license, even to a party that has become completely dependent on the patent. In Jazz Photo Corp. v. United States International Trade Commission,264 F. 3d 1094 (Fed. Cir. 2001). she clarified the law of repair and reconstruction (permitting the owner of a patented item to fix the item when it breaks, but not to essentially build a new item from the parts of an old one), writing that it was not a patent infringement for one party to restore another party's patented "one-use" camera to be used a second time.
With respect to the court's federal contracts jurisprudence, in 2010 she wrote a dissenting opinion in M. Maropakis Carpentry, Inc. v. United States. Stanfield Johnson has called her the court's "great dissenter", and has said that her dissents in the area of federal contracts "consistently reflect the view that a primary responsibility of the court is to serve 'the national policy of fairness to contractors'". He writes: At the core of Judge Newman's dissenting jurisprudence is the premise that the sovereign as a contracting party should be accountable for its actions, subject only to limited exceptions not to be presumed, unnecessarily expanded, or imposed in a formalistic doctrinaire way that ignores or masks the facts of government conduct. Where the facts justify it, contractors should be entitled to a 'fair and just' remedy, and the Federal Circuit is there to make sure this happens.
In Merck KGaA v. Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd. (2005), the Supreme Court modified a point of law by expressly adopting Judge Newman's position.
In 2015 Newman wrote a dissent in Ariosa v. Sequenom that criticized Federal Circuit's holding on patent-eligible subject matter (claims preempting the use of the laws of nature), following the Supreme Court's decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. Instead of inconsistent interpretation of patentable subject matter by different courts at different times (i.e. requiring additional "inventive concepts" to transform a newly discovered law of nature into a patentable claim), Newman maintains that claims, limited to a small number of routine applications of new discoveries should be allowed because such claims do not “preempt further study of this science, nor the development of additional applications". Gene Quinn and Nancy Braman, writing for IPWatchdog, praised Judge Newman's position in this case, stating that her "dissent in Ariosa would be a way forward for the Federal Circuit and would be in keeping with the admonition from the Supreme Court that §101 not be used to swallow all of patent law".
In April 2023, Newman wrote a dissent in SAS Institute Inc v. World Programming Ltd., asserting that the majority had conflated infringement and copyrightability questions and failed to enunciate the burden of proof.
Investigation Initiation In April 2023, it was reported that Chief Judge Kimberly A. Moore had demanded an evaluation of whether then 95-year-old Newman could keep up with a case load expected for a Federal Circuit judge, noting Newman's excessively long times to submit judicial opinions. Some of Newman’s fellow judges in court orders have accused Newman of “paranoid” and “bizarre” behavior. In response to reports questioning Newman's competence, Mercer University professor David Hricik, writing for Patently-O, stated:
The initial report by Gene Quinn for IPWatchdog noted that "Newman has filed dissenting opinions in at least two recent cases that show no signs she is suffering from any disability", stating that these were "classic Newman dissents, do not read as if they were written by law clerks, and do not show signs of decline or disability". In June 2023, former Chief Judge Randall Rader stated in The Washington Post that he had spoken with Newman recently, and that she was "the same Polly I knew 10 or 20 years ago—as sharp as ever".
On April 14, the Federal Circuit Judicial Council released a statement and unsealed orders dated March 24, 2023, and April 13, 2023. The March 24, 2023, order stated that unnamed court staff and judges had raised concerns about potential impairments of Newman's cognitive abilities and other concerns.