Opinion ID: 201413
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Reasonable attorney's fee

Text: 22 The plaintiffs emphasize that we are virtually obligat[ed] to grant a fee award to a prevailing party. Gay Officers Action League, 247 F.3d at 293. However, as Farrar itself acknowledges, [i]n some circumstances, even a plaintiff who formally `prevails' under § 1988 should receive no attorney's fees at all. 506 U.S. at 115, 113 S.Ct. 566. 23 Farrar was a § 1983 civil rights suit in which a plaintiff sought $17 million in damages against six defendants who had allegedly conspired to violate his due process rights. A jury found that one of the defendants had committed an act or acts under color of state law that deprived [Farrar] of a civil right, but that this conduct was not a proximate cause of his damages. 506 U.S. at 106, 113 S.Ct. 566. The district court awarded Farrar $1 in nominal damages and $280,000 in attorney's fees. The Fifth Circuit reversed the fee award, finding that Farrar's victory was too insignificant to confer prevailing party status under § 1988. 24 The Supreme Court disagreed with the Fifth Circuit's reasoning but affirmed the fee award reversal. It held that Farrar was not entitled to fees, despite the fact that the nominal damages award conferred prevailing party status. The Court explained that the most critical factor in determining the reasonableness of a fee award is the degree of success obtained. Id. at 114, 113 S.Ct. 566 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). Where Farrar sought $17 million in compensatory damages but received only $1 in nominal damages, he obtained such a small degree of success as to make the only reasonable fee ... no fee at all. Id. at 115, 113 S.Ct. 566. 25 Justice O'Connor wrote separately to explain the relationship between nominal damages and a fee award. While [n]ominal relief does not necessarily a nominal victory make[,] ... a substantial difference between the judgment recovered and the recovery sought suggests that the victory is in fact purely technical. Id. at 121, 113 S.Ct. 566. Other relevant factors include the significance of the legal issue on which the plaintiff claims to have prevailed and whether the success furthered a public purpose. Id. at 121-22, 113 S.Ct. 566; see also O'Connor v. Huard, 117 F.3d 12, 18 (1st Cir.1997) (recognizing similar considerations). Where the district court has properly weighed the foregoing factors, there is no abuse of discretion to merit a reversal. See id. 26 Here, the court explained its denial of fees in an eight-page ruling that reviewed the course of the litigation and set forth the relevant law. It concluded that the nominal damages award, the entitlement to which was conceded by the defendants from the virtual outset, was too de minimis a victory in relation to the plaintiffs' other claims to merit a fee award. See Farrar, 506 U.S. at 114, 113 S.Ct. 566; Me. Admin. Sch. Dist. No. 35, 321 F.3d at 14-15 (fee award cannot be based on a hollow victory). The plaintiffs claim that this ruling was an abuse of discretion because it failed to recognize the significance of the nominal damages award — namely, that the award included an implicit finding that the Old Plan was unconstitutional and would thus have a preclusive effect if the defendants attempted to revive the Plan. The defendants contend that the award did not include such a finding. 27 We acknowledge that the language of the decision explaining the nominal damages award is susceptible to both parties' readings. The court said the following: 28 John Feeney[, Jr.] and Kathleen McCoy were denied seat assignments at their preferred schools because of their race. For that reason they are entitled to an award of nominal damages, and defendants do not contend otherwise. Defendants are correct, however, that absent the deprivation of a constitutional right, nominal damages may not be awarded. See Carey v. Piphus, 435 U.S. 247, 266-67, 98 S.Ct. 1042, 55 L.Ed.2d 252 (1978). As the remaining plaintiffs can make no showing of a deprivation under Texas v. Lesage, 528 U.S. 18, 21, 120 S.Ct. 467, 145 L.Ed.2d 347 (1999) (per curiam), no damages, nominal or otherwise, may be awarded. 29 BCF V, at 1. Although the nominal damages judgment does not specify that the Old Plan was unconstitutional, the plaintiffs assert that such a finding was necessarily implicit in light of the court's own statement that nominal damages must be premised on a constitutional injury. Losing a seat assignment because of race is not, per se, a constitutional deprivation. Race-conscious policies are permissible if they are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest, which may include remedying past discrimination, City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 507, 109 S.Ct. 706, 102 L.Ed.2d 854 (1989) (considering whether Richmond's race-conscious plan for city construction contracts was narrowly tailored to remedy prior discrimination), or achieving educational diversity, Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 343, 123 S.Ct. 2325, 156 L.Ed.2d 304 (2003) ([T]he Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the [University of Michigan] Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.). Thus, the plaintiffs reason, the defendants' concession about the role of race in the plaintiffs' seat assignments does not, standing alone, admit the constitutional violation required to support an award of nominal damages. The deprivation was unconstitutional only if the assignment plan was not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest, or, in other words, if the Old Plan was unconstitutional. 30 Yet, the nominal damages decision does not address the issues of compelling interest and narrow tailoring that would be integral to a fully developed legal analysis of the constitutionality of the Old Plan. Nor did the court explicitly state that Feeney and McCoy had suffered a constitutional injury. Its comment that nominal damages require such an injury was not an explanation for Feeney and McCoy's award, but rather for the denial of damages to the remaining plaintiffs. See BCF V, at 1. Indeed, the only basis that the court cited for Feeney and McCoy's award was their loss of seats because of their race — the point conceded by the defendants. This language suggests that the award did not include a finding that the Old Plan was unconstitutional. 31 We recognized this ambiguity in the nominal damages decision when we considered the merits of this case on appeal, noting that [a]lthough the district court never explicitly described the Old Plan as unconstitutional, ... nominal damages in this context require a constitutional violation. Anderson, 375 F.3d at 80 n. 12. Based on this logic, we accepted the colorable premise that the Old Plan was unconstitutional for the purposes of our analysis. 8 Id. However, the court's ruling, if any, on the constitutionality of the Old Plan was not directly before us in that appeal. Now that we must decide in the context of this attorney's fees appeal whether the court, in fact, ruled on the constitutionality of the Old Plan, we conclude that there was no such ruling. Instead, the court awarded nominal damages on the basis of the defendants' concession, which acknowledged the dispositive effect of race in the school assignments of Feeney and McCoy, but which rejected any conclusion that the Old Plan was unconstitutional. 32 This conclusion is compelled by the following considerations: 33 (1) The constitutionality of the Old Plan was not actively litigated; the court refused to consider injunctive or declaratory relief regarding the Old Plan once the New Plan was in place. Indeed, the court's description of the Old Plan as constitutionally dubious in a ruling denying prospective relief one month before the nominal damages award, BCF IV, 260 F.Supp.2d at 334, signals that it did not consider the constitutionality of the Old Plan a resolved question. 34 (2) The defendants' motion opposing summary judgment, filed soon after the decision denying prospective relief, recognized that a finding on the constitutionality of the Old Plan would require the court to try issues that it had not previously considered and therefore urged the court to award damages without reaching the constitutional issue. In essence, the defendants expressed a willingness to pay nominal damages to Feeney and McCoy without admitting any constitutional injury. As we have discussed, the language of the ensuing award is consistent with this position. 35 (3) Any remaining ambiguity on this point is resolved by the district court's decision denying attorney's fees. There, the court described the basis for the plaintiffs' prevailing party status as a one dollar nominal award to two of ten original plaintiffs, the entitlement to which was conceded by the defendants from the virtual outset.... (emphasis added). Again, the defendants had conceded only that they were willing to pay damages because Feeney and McCoy were denied seats based on their race, not because the Old Plan was unconstitutional. The district court's description of its own judgment thus forecloses the plaintiffs' argument that it found the Old Plan unconstitutional. 36 Viewed in this light, the nominal damages award does not represent a victory on a significant legal issue. To the contrary, it represents such a minimal success in the context of this litigation that the district court supportably concluded that the only reasonable fee is ... no fee at all. Farrar, 506 U.S. at 115, 113 S.Ct. 566. The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying attorney's fees. 37 Affirmed.