Court Opinion

ID: 9851824
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:20:17.22538+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:16.140213
License: Public Domain

BURNETT, Judge,
dissenting.
The majority’s decision creates a new organ in the body of Idaho jurisprudence— the doctrine of the more worthy windfall. The majority holds that if two defendants jointly incur certain costs or attorney fees, and if one of them ultimately prevails while the other does not, the prevailing defendant cannot recover any such costs or fees because the recovery would be a windfall to the nonprevailing defendant. Of course, denying all recovery is no less a windfall to the nonprevailing plaintiff. But that, evidently, is the more worthy windfall because it was the defendants’ counsel who had the temerity to present the trial court with a “package deal.” Ante at p. 264.
The fundamental problem, of course, is the majority’s insistence upon framing the issue in narrow absolutes — all or nothing. Admittedly, the parties have invited this myopic choice. But in the last analysis, it is for the courts, not the parties, to say how costs and attorney fees shall be awarded under I.R.C.P. 54(d) and 54(e).
The district court apparently interpreted these rules to provide that if a defendant has prevailed, and even if certain costs and *266fees were necessary to his defense, nevertheless, he is barred from any recovery unless he also shows that they were not necessary to someone else’s defense. I find no explicit textual support for such an interpretation. Naturally, a court may disapprove costs or fees when necessary to prevent a double recovery by two prevailing parties who seek the same award. But that problem does not confront us here. The district court and today’s majority have allowed no recovery at all.
Rule 54(d)(1)(B) recognizes the trial court’s discretionary power to apportion costs “in a fair and equitable manner” among partially prevailing parties. I submit that similar discretion impliedly exists to apportion costs jointly incurred by prevailing and nonprevailing parties. I would remand the case and instruct the district court to exercise such discretion, probing beneath the parties’ absolutist posturings and fashioning a just award.