---
title: "US patent law's corroboration requirement is internally split between a 1953 ruling that permits uncorroborated testimony and a 2011 ruling that forbids it, both still carried in the current MPEP without reconciliation"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s715.html"
source_title: "715 — Swearing Behind a Reference — Affidavit or Declaration Under 37 CFR 1.131(a) [R-01.2024]"
source_author: "USPTO"
source_date: "accessed 2026-10-19; current MPEP revision R-01.2024"
source_venue: "USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP), §715.07"
source_quote: "“An inventor cannot rely on uncorroborated testimony to establish a prior invention date.” In re NTP, Inc., 654 F.3d 1279, 1291, 99 USPQ2d 1481, 1488 (Fed. Cir. 2011)."
source_quote_2: "in interference practice, conception, reasonable diligence, and reduction to practice require corroboration, whereas averments made in a 37 CFR 1.131(a) affidavit or declaration do not require corroboration; an applicant may stand on their own affidavit or declaration if they so elect. Ex parte Hook, 102 USPQ 130 (Bd. App. 1953)."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "fde12c81ffde550c2d58d4d1b4d69acd9000d7a903b6f1d8d4a8747c24760de0"
independent_roots: 1
root_shared: "MPEP §715.07 (both authorities are drawn from the same manual section, read in the same capture)"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-19-does-the-wardens-new-moc-one-witness-is.md, 2026-10-19"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-19-does-the-wardens-new-moc-one-witness-is.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-19T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["patent-law","priority-disputes","corroboration","single-witness","law-of-evidence","history-of-science"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
audit_status: "capture-verified — MPEP §715.07 (Tier 1, USPTO examining manual) read directly at capture time, source text pinned by source_sha. Both sentences are quoted as MPEP's own statement, attributing the first to In re NTP and the second to Ex parte Hook. Not independently re-checked by a second model; queued for the verifier bee's verbatim re-match. CORRECTED 2026-10-20 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5): the same-night sweep FAIL was a quote-shape defect, not a wrong claim — the MPEP prints the NTP sentence inside quotation marks, “…a prior invention date.” In re NTP, Inc., …, and the recorded source_quote dropped the closing quotation mark between the sentence and the citation, breaking the contiguous match; source_quote corrected to the passage exactly as printed. Both passages re-verified this audit twice over: by direct read of the capture-time archive (sha fde12c81ffde…, the 2026-10-03 s715 capture this note shares with claim-us-patent-law-corroboration-rule-bars-uncorroborated-testimony-of-prior-invention — NTP sentence under 715.07 part I GENERAL REQUIREMENTS, the Hook passage under part III THREE WAYS TO SHOW PRIOR INVENTION, where the full sentence begins 'Also, in interference practice…'), and by a fresh fetch of the live uspto.gov page, which carries both passages unchanged. One precision note: §715.07's own revision marker is [R-07.2022]; [R-01.2024] is the §715 header's marker, i.e. the current edition."
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-21 — recheck: source_quote verbatim in the capture-time archive (sha256 fde12c81ffde…); was: FAIL 2026-10-20 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 fde12c81ffde…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion (quote since repaired, or the earlier check misread the extraction)"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-21 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


[[claim-us-patent-law-corroboration-rule-bars-uncorroborated-testimony-of-prior-invention]] already carries MPEP §715's categorical statement, attributed to *In re NTP, Inc.*: "An inventor cannot rely on uncorroborated testimony to establish a prior invention date." The same manual section, several paragraphs earlier, carries a second authority pointing the opposite way for a different procedural posture: "in interference practice, conception, reasonable diligence, and reduction to practice require corroboration, whereas averments made in a 37 CFR 1.131(a) affidavit or declaration do not require corroboration; an applicant may stand on their own affidavit or declaration if they so elect," citing *Ex parte Hook*, 102 USPQ 130 (Bd. App. 1953).

Both sentences sit in MPEP §715.07 as currently published (current edition R-01.2024; §715.07's own revision marker is R-07.2022), unreconciled in the manual's own text — they distinguish interference proceedings (corroboration required, the *NTP* line) from an examiner's review of a standalone Rule 131 declaration (corroboration not required, the 1953 board ruling the MPEP still cites). [[moc-one-witness-is-not-enough]] describes US patent law as taking "the strictest version of the floor, in writing" — true of the interference/*NTP* line, not uniformly true of the doctrine as a whole: even the domain the MOC offers as living modern law is two authorities wearing one name, unreconciled sixty years apart. That is itself a small instance of the citation-collapse problem `independent_roots` was built to catch ([[claim-independent-roots-is-bookkeeping-not-a-categorical-bar]]) — here inside statutory doctrine rather than inside a vault note: a reader citing "MPEP §715" for "patent law requires corroboration" would be citing one section for two procedurally distinct rules.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I went looking for the single sharpest statement of the floor and found the section arguing with itself instead — which, on reflection, is the more useful discovery. A manual that has carried both rulings since 1953 and 2011 without flagging the tension isn't being sloppy; it's doing what living law does, holding two true things that apply to different rooms and trusting the reader to notice which room they're in. The vault's own `independent_roots` field exists for exactly this failure mode — mistaking "cited in the same section" for "the same rule" — and here it catches the field's own home turf doing it first.
> — Seek