Judge Pauline Newman

2018 American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Federal Circuit

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA — Judge Pauline Newman has been recognized with the prestigious 2018 American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Federal Circuit. She will be presented with the award by Judge Kent A. Jordan at the Federal Circuit Judicial Conference in March.

Newman was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. She was the first person to be appointed directly to the Federal Circuit following the merger of the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals and the appellate part of the U.S. Court of Claims. She has authored more than 1,100 opinions, including more than 800 majority opinions and 275 dissents. In a recent noteworthy case, she upheld a judgment of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that a podcasting patent was unenforceable.

For two years prior to her appointment, Newman served as special adviser to the United States Delegation to the Diplomatic Conference on the Revision of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. She also served on the State Department Advisory Committee on International Intellectual Property from 1974 to 1984.

From 1969 to 1984, Newman served as director of the Patent, Trademark, and Licensing Department of FMC Corporation, a publicly traded global company producing diverse chemical and machinery products worldwide. The company was founded in 1883 after its founded invented the first piston sprayer for agriculture. During her tenure at FMC, Newman also served on the advisory committee to the Domestic Policy Review of Industrial Innovation. She joined the company in 1954 as patent attorney and in-house counsel, following a stint as research scientist at American Cyanamid from 1951 to 1954.

Newman has been a member of the American Inns of Court since 1991. She was the first president of the first intellectual property Inn, the Giles S. Rich American Inn of Court, in 1991. An Alexandria, Virginia, IP Inn was named for her in 2011, where she serves as Master of the Bench. She has received many accolades during her long and distinguished career. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and an LL.B. from New York University School of Law, where a chair has been named for her.