Overextension makes court adjudication ineffective by narrowing the bandwidth for evidence evaluation---that causes errors in decisions about novel inventions and patent scope

If we take my argument in Part II as a given--that is, if we assume for present purposes that claims provide valuable but imperfect information about the invention--then what should a court do with them as a policy matter? A common intuition holds that a court's job is to reach the most accurate outcome possible. That is, a court should try to discern the real invention and the optimal patent scope. Of course, even in an individual case, a court is constrained in its pursuit of accuracy by finite adjudication resources. Courts cannot realistically hold multiyear trials, nor can they summon thousands of experts. Thus, our initial focus on accuracy must be qualified: courts should attempt to achieve the most accurate outcome given their available resources. Notwithstanding such resource constraints, however, the intuition is that no artificial limits should be imposed. Within this paradigm, a court should allocate its budget to maximize its ability to pursue the truth: the court should collect as much evidence as feasible and then consider all that evidence on an equal basis. By equal weight, I do not mean that a court would say the following: "Witness A, the upstanding citizen, says the defendant stabbed the victim, while Witness B, the known habitual liar, says the defendant did not, and because all evidence is given equal weight, the result is a toss-up." Rather, I mean that a court will consider all the evidence in light of its credibility and in the totality of the circumstances, to get to the result that is most likely to reflect the underlying factual truth on the question at issue. The contradistinction is to a regime where courts are required by a preset rule to favor or disfavor certain types of evidence. For example, a court that excludes a bloody knife that the police obtained through an illegal search thereby gives this evidence zero weight. The court does so not because it thinks that the knife is unreliable evidence or that the underlying factual truth is that the defendant is innocent. It does so because the preset exclusionary rule mandates that courts accord zero weight to evidence obtained through illegal searches. By definition, therefore, a court that is seeking to maximize accuracy in an individual case would consider equally all the available evidence. But this formulation is not just a rhetorical trick. The substantive point is that, if the goal is simply to maximize accuracy, the law should rarely have categorical rules that exclude or disfavor broad swaths of evidence. It should instead [*547] use a totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry that considers both the claim text and all reasonably collectible extrinsic evidence. And such totality-of-the-circumstances inquiries are what Corbin and his fellow travelers in patent law generally propose.