Opinion ID: 3038349
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether Our Earlier Decision in This Case

Text: Decided the Issue of Whether the Pardinis Are Entitled to Attorney’s Fees 6 The most difficult issue on this appeal concerns the application of our disposition of the Pardinis’ first appeal and thus we begin our discussion of the merits of this appeal by addressing the scope of our decision remanding this case to the District Court. “It is axiomatic that on remand for further proceedings after decision by an appellate court, the trial court must proceed in accordance with the mandate and the law of the case as established on appeal.” Bankers Trust Co. v. Bethlehem Steel Corp., 761 F.2d 943, 949 (3d Cir. 1985). “A trial court must implement both the letter and the spirit of the mandate, taking into account the appellate court’s opinion and the circumstances it embraces.” Id. “The mandate and the opinion must be considered together in their entirety with particular reference to the issues considered.” Id. at 950. “From the proposition that a trial court must adhere to the decision and mandate of an appellate court there follows the long-settled corollary that upon remand, it may consider, as a matter of first impression, those issues not expressly or implicitly disposed of by the appellate decision.” Id. Application of the rules usually governing remands might pose a problem if our first Pardini opinion was inconsistent with Woodside but we are satisfied that Woodside and our mandate on the first Pardini appeal are not inconsistent. We have reached this conclusion because taken together, our instructions to the District Court and the circumstances of our decision did not require that the District Court grant the Pardinis attorney’s fees but rather required that it address and decide the issue of whether the fees should be allowed. The District Court’s August 29, 2003 decision – which we reviewed and ultimately reversed – did not decide whether the Pardinis were entitled to attorney’s fees because the District Court’s denial of their claim had rendered that issue moot. Accordingly, not until we reversed the District Court and remanded the case to that court was it confronted with the issue of whether to allow attorney’s fees, and thus it is only on the present appeal that we have been constrained to consider whether they be awarded. Although the Pardinis are correct that in our earlier decision we discussed the issue of attorney’s fees, our discussion 7 was preliminary, leaving much for the District Court to address. Indeed, the discussion appears exclusively in footnote 4, which in full states: At oral argument, the parties informed the court that the Pardinis eventually agreed to an IEP that did not include conductive education. However, since we conclude that Georgia was entitled to receive conductive education as a part of Georgia’s IEP until the dispute was resolved, they are entitled to reimbursement of the out-of-pocket expense resulting from the AIU’s failure to comply with 20 U.S.C. § 1415(j) as well as reasonable attorneys’ fees. We do not think that Mr. Pardini is precluded from recovering reasonable attorneys’ fees otherwise provided for under the IDEA merely because he is seeking reimbursement for his own expenses while representing his daughter. In Zucker v. Westinghouse, 374 F.3d 221, 227 (3d Cir. 2004) we recognized that, absent an expression of congressional intent to the contrary, a plaintiff’s entitlement to attorneys’ fees is not eliminated merely because he/she was pro se counsel. Although we were there discussing the right of a pro se plaintiff in a shareholder’s derivative action, that conclusion is not limited to that specific type of action. Since Mr. Pardini requested ‘such other relief as the Court deems fitting and proper,’ in his complaint, he is entitled to recover reasonable attorneys’ fees to the extent that he is the prevailing party. Pardini, 420 F.3d at 183 n.4. Although we understand why the Pardinis might construe these statements as constituting a decision directing an award of attorney’s fees, a close reading of it shows that the footnote 8 offers nothing more than preliminary observations. In footnote 4 we cited to Zucker v. Westinghouse Electric, 374 F.3d 221 (3d Cir. 2004), for the proposition that we should look to the relevant statute to determine whether a fee-shifting provision extends to pro se attorneys. Our decision in Zucker, however, shows that the inquiry did not end with that observation because we ultimately denied attorney’s fees to the shareholder-objector who sought fees in that case. Indeed, we reached that conclusion only after discussing and adopting the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Kay, a case which also guided our decision in Woodside, and after describing Woodside approvingly. See id. at 227-29. Moreover, we specifically stated in footnote 4 in Pardini that the Pardinis only would be entitled to attorney’s fees “otherwise provided for under the IDEA.” Pardini, 420 F.3d at 183 n.4. We therefore did not determine whether the IDEA’s fee-shifting provision allows the Pardinis to recover attorney’s fees and instead left that matter for the District Court to decide on remand. The District Court, in turn, correctly followed our holding in Woodside, where we construed the same fee-shifting provision in the IDEA involved here and concluded that it does not provide for attorney’s fees in the case of attorney-parents who represent their children in cases brought pursuant to the IDEA. See Woodside, 248 F.3d at 130 (stating that “[t]he sole issue here is whether [20 U.S.C. § 1415(i)(3)(B)] authorizes an award of attorney fees to an attorney-parent who represented his child in administrative proceedings under the IDEA”). Aside from footnote 4, the only mention of attorney’s fees in our earlier Pardini decision appears in the conclusion, which states: “We will therefore reverse the decision of the District Court and remand for the court to determine . . . the amount of any attorneys fees.” Pardini, 420 F.3d at 192. The inclusion of the word “any” further supports the view that the grant of attorney’s fees was a possibility rather a certainty. That possibility at the very least was contingent on the District Court’s determination of whether such fees are “provided for under the IDEA,” id. at 183 n.4, an issue that we left to the District Court to decide. 9