Embattled U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Judge Pauline Newman, who has been referred to as the "great dissenter," touched on the role of the dissent as a teaching tool at an American Bar Association conference Friday.

"The dissent helps the student to understand the balance that the court decided to reach—what philosophy, what logic, what evidence they rejected as being not probative for whatever reason, and what was accepted. Without the dissent, you don't have that information because it's not presented in a majority opinion," Newman said in a recorded interview with Steven Caltrider, chair of the ABA's Intellectual Property Law Section and chief IP counsel for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.