Opinion ID: 504633
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Do Special Circumstances Make a Fee Award Unjust?

Text: 24 Even if the position of the United States was not substantially justified, a fee award is inappropriate if special circumstances make an award unjust. 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2412(d)(1)(A). The legislative history of the provision indicates that this safety valve was designed to insure that the Government is not deterred from advancing in good faith the novel but credible extensions and interpretations of the law that often underlie vigorous enforcement efforts and to permit courts to rely on equitable considerations in denying a fee award. H.R.REP. NO. 1418, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. 11, reprinted in 1980 U.S.CODE CONG. & ADMIN.NEWS 4953, 4984, 4990. We emphasized in Spencer, however, that fees should ordinarily be awarded if the Government loses a test case in which it argued that controlling precedent should be overruled, not merely that precedent should be extended or reinterpreted in a novel way. A possible award of fees should not deter the Government from bringing a test case if it deems the matter sufficiently important; more significantly, it would be unjust to compel the private party, chosen arbitrarily by the Government, to incur the full cost of reconsidering an established rule when the benefits of doing so redound to the community as a whole. See Spencer, 712 F.2d at 558-59 & n. 72. 25 The Government contends that in Wilkett the ICC considered an issue of first impression--whether a trucking company might lawfully be denied a license based upon the proprietor's criminal convictions for nontransportation offenses--and resolved it by extending the criteria it routinely used to assess an applicant's fitness. We find this characterization dead wrong. As we said when rendering judgment on the merits, the ICC's decision did not constitute a plausible extension of prevailing standards of fitness. Rather, it marked an unexplained departure from previously applied standards that was inconsistent with the ICC's decision in a similar case. Wilkett, 710 F.2d at 865. We concluded, moreover, that the Government's position was misdirected, indeed flatly unreasonable. In the face of these findings, the Government can hardly argue that it advocated not only a novel but also a credible extension of existing law, which the legislative history establishes as a precondition to a denial of fees when the Government's position lacked substantial justification. Wilkett is clearly entitled to an award of attorney fees.