Mandel Bros. v. Wallace’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

108 federal appellate · 26 district · 3 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 212 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““[T]he position taken by the United States Court of Appeals in this [was] that the cosmetic problem here was remote and unrelated to the problems considered in the prior art. For this reason that court held that patentees in the field of cosmetics were not bound by prior art knowledge disclosed by the Shipp and other patents. The court therefore considered this patent almost as though patentees were writing on a clean sheet. Accordingly it held that the use of urea in the cosmetics field with the results here obtained were patentable invention. “In this the court was in error. As we have pointed out, the general store of chemical knowledge in 1938 was such that any one working on any problem of acidic corrosion and irritation would naturally and spontaneously have tried urea. All that these patentees did was to utilize in a cosmetic preparation, publicly available knowledge that urea would inhibit acidic corrosion. The step taken by the patentees in advance of past knowledge was too short to amount to invention. They merely applied an old process of inhibition to a new cosmetic use. This is not invention. Dow Chemical Co. v. Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co., 324 U.S. 320, 327 , 65 S.Ct. 647, 650 , 89 L.Ed. 973 .””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 352 F. Supp. 1006 - Metaframe Corporation v. Biozonics Corporation

2. “«<* * * skiilful experiments in a laboratory, in cases where the principles of the' investigations are well known, and the achievement of the desired and requires routine work rather than imagination, do not involve invention.’ ””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 106 F. Supp. 427 - Robertshaw-Fulton Controls Co. v. Patrol Valve Co.