Court Opinion

ID: 9459514
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:22:52.2665+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:11.968188
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I concur in Chief Judge Friendly’s lucid and perceptive opinion without any reservations, save one.
It seems to me that our remand on the subject of attorneys’ fees should be broader in scope. The majority opinion would limit the district court to awarding attorneys’ fees only if in the exercise of its equitable powers it found that Gamble-Skogmo, Inc., had acted “vexatiously or in bad faith.” Cf. Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., 390 U.S. 400, 402 n. 4, 88 S.Ct. 964, 19 L.Ed.2d 1263 (1968). I read Mills v. Electric Auto-Lite Co., 396 U.S. 375, 389-397, 90 S.Ct. 616, 24 L.Ed.2d 593 (1970), somewhat more broadly. Mills, of course, did hold that no pecuniary benefit need be demonstrated for the award of attorneys’ fees when the judgment results in a “common fund” for the plaintiffs or for their class, thereby extending Sprague v. Ticonic Bank, 307 U.S. 161, 59 S.Ct. 777, 83 L.Ed. 1184 (1939). With the majority’s views on this point I do not quarrel.
It sems to me, however, that Mills went beyond this to say that the court has power in a § 14(a) suit to award attorneys’ fees “when circumstances make such an award appropriate . . . .” 396 U.S. at 390-391, 90 S.Ct. at 625. In the course of the Mills opinion the Court went on to say that
Nevertheless, the stress placed by Congress on the importance of fair and informed corporate suffrage leads to the conclusion that, in vindicating the statutory policy, petitioners have rendered a substantial service to the corporation and its shareholders.
396 U.S. at 396.1 This, it seems to me, gives a somewhat new and different basis for the awarding of attorneys’ fees in an appropriate case — namely, that the plaintiffs have in effect enforced an important congressional objective and as it has sometimes been put have acted as “private attorneys general” in effectuating that policy. On this basis in any event attorneys’ fees have been awarded in civil rights cases,2 a Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 case,3 and more recently in an environmental case.4
The effectuation of congressional policy as a separate rationale for the award of attorneys’ fees would seem to me to give the district court here some greater leeway for the making of such an award in this instance than would the majority opinion. It may be that the recovery of a substantial fund from which attorneys’ *1311fees can be paid would, as the majority here would have it, preclude as a matter of law the awarding of attorneys’ fees even where the strong congressional policy underlying § 14(a) was effectuated only by the litigation in issue. I would prefer to see the issue of attorneys’ fees decided only after further findings, since those findings are going to be necessary in any event, even on the basis of the limited remand of the majority opinion.

. It can be argued that this sentence was wholly in the context of cases in which “it may be impossible to assign monetary value to the benefit.” That, at least, is the subject to which the sentence immediately preceding the “Nevertheless” sentence quoted in the body of this opinion relates. Presumably, the majority would so confine this language as a matter of law. I prefer to think that Mills leaves the question open.

. E. g., Lee v. Southern Home Sites Corp., 444 F.2d 143 (5th Cir. 1971) (Wisdom, J.) ; NAACP v. Allen, 340 F.Supp. 703 (M.D.Ala.1972) (Johnson, J.). See also Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., supra.

. Yablonski v. United Mine Workers, 466 F.2d 424 (D.C.Cir.1972).

. LaRaza Unida v. Volpe, 57 F.R.D. 94 (N.D.Cal., Oct. 19, 1972) (Peckham, J.).