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There are a variety of views on what constitutes common sense.  Here are a few notable quotations:

“Le sens commun n’est pas si commun.” –Voltaire

“Common sense is very uncommon.” — Horace Greeley

“Common sense ain’t so common.” — Will Rogers

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” – Albert Einstein

“Common sense is what tells us the Earth is flat and the Sun goes around it.” — Anonymous

“The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.” – Henry Ward Beecher

“Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.” – Thomas H. Huxley

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Common sense is the genius of humanity.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.” – Douglas Adams

“Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.” — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

“Common sense –Sound practical judgment; that degree of intelligence and reason, as exercised upon the relations of persons and things and the ordinary affairs of life, which is possessed by the generality of mankind, and which would suffice to direct the conduct and actions of the individual in a manner to agree with the behavior of ordinary persons.” — Black’s Law Dictionary

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You can read the court’s opinion here: [Read].

You can download the entire oral argument here: [Listen/Download].

The Federal Circuit has recently been issuing Rule 36 opinions with prodigious fecundity.¹  However, there is still plenty of intriguing commentary in the oral arguments underlying these terse judgments.

One interesting exchange occurred recently between Judge Moore and the associate solicitor for the PTO in the In re Rackman appeal.  Judge Moore was exploring when it is acceptable for the PTO to assert that it is obvious to modify a device in a prior art reference by adding software to it if the rationale that the PTO gives is simply to increase the functionality of the device.  [Listen]  Judge Moore seemed concerned about the effect that this could have on the patentability of future software inventions.

You can listen to the entire oral argument here: [Listen].

You can read the court’s opinion, such as it is, here: [Read].

¹ I’m not really well-read enough to use phrases like “prodigious fecundity;” but, I read the following Learned Hand quote today and couldn’t resist:  “[A]s the law stands, the inventor must accept the position of a mythically omniscient worker in his chosen field. As the arts proliferate with prodigious fecundity, his lot is an increasingly hard one.” Merit Mfg. Co. v. Hero Mfg. Co., 185 F.2d 350, 352 (2d Cir. 1950).  Which begs the question, “How would Learned Hand have decided Bilski v. Kappos?”