Gottschalk v. Benson’s Empirical Analysis
1972
Citation profile
207 federal appellate · 172 district · 8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 842 later decisions (23 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2024 · most notably Diamond v. Diehr (1981), Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980)
207 federal appellate · 172 district · 8 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 35 U.S.C. § 100 · 35 U.S.C. § 101
Relies on Smith v. Snow · Expanded Metal Co. v. Bradford · Tilghman v. Proctor · O'Reilly v. Morse
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 842 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. A claimed process involving a fundamental principle [such as an equation] that uses a particular machine or apparatus would not preempt uses of the principle that do not also use the specified machine or apparatus in the manner claimed. And a claimed process that transforms a particular article to a specified different state or thing by applying a fundamental principle would not preempt the use of the principle to transform any other article, to transform the same article but in a manner not covered by the claim, or to do anything other than transform the specified article.”
28 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Parker v. Flook · Diamond v. Diehr“Phenomena of nature, though just discovered, mental processes, and abstract intellectual concepts are not patentable, as they are the basic tools of scientific and technological work.”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Parker v. Flook · In re Trovato“a method of programming a general-purpose digital computer to convert signals from binary-coded decimal form into pure binary form.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Dann v. Johnston · Parker v. Flook
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.