Court Opinion

ID: 9474903
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:12:20.931284+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:24.246543
License: Public Domain

HILL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I agree with the majority’s conclusion that the intervenors in this action should be considered “plaintiffs” for the purposes of determining whether they should be held liable for attorney’s fees. I must respectfully dissent, however, from the majority’s judgment that the intervenors’ claim to intervention in this case was frivolous. The majority frames the issue as I do, by asking “whether [the intervenors’] decision to pursue [their] claims by filing a motion to intervene was frivolous or unreasonable.” Ante, at 1485. I cannot agree with the majority’s conclusion, however, that the intervention they sought “was clearly unavailable to them under existing case law” because it was untimely. Id. In my view, intervenors could reasonably have concluded, on the basis of the case law available to them at the time, that their claim to intervention enjoyed a sufficient probability of success before the district court and this court when it was filed to have elevated it above frivolousness.
The consent decree that is the subject of this litigation established, inter alia, mandatory racial quotas for hiring and promotion within the Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, of which intervenors are white employees. See Reeves v. Wilkes, 754 F.2d 965, 967 (11th Cir.1985). The hir*1486ing provisions of the decree stipulated that 50 percent of all entry level vacancies for deputy sheriff positions would be filled by black applicants until such time as 40 black deputies were employed. The promotion provisions similarly required that at least 50 percent of promotions made be given to blacks, but those provisions did not include a time limit on their operation or any numerical goal that would have to be achieved before they would no longer be effective. Instead, the decree simply provided that the promotions system it mandated would be followed “until the court shall determine that the defendants have complied in good faith with this order and the requirements of federal laws relating to employment practices.” Id. (quoting from the decree). The decree was approved by the district court on June 18, 1979.
In February of 1982, two years and eight months later, intervenors sought to intervene in the implementation of the decree for the very limited purpose of triggering the closure provision of that portion of the decree which governs promotions. As this court noted in reversing the district court’s decision to allow the officers to intervene, “they did not make a collateral attack upon the legality of the decree, nor seek to review prior promotion decisions made under the decree.” Id. at 968. Instead they simply contended “that ‘good faith’ had been established and that the remedial purpose sought to be accomplished by the provision had been served.” Id.
The majority considers it significant that this court, closely following United States v. Jefferson County, 720 F.2d 1511 (11th Cir.1983), found the intervenors to have failed to establish that their claim was timely filed. Those decisions, of course, were not available to intervenors when they decided to seek to intervene and, for that reason, are of limited usefulness in determining whether that decision was frivolous or unreasonable in light of the case law available at the time. Moreover, to the extent that such decisions are relevant to our assessment of the reasonableness of intervenors’ attempt to intervene, I would include among them our recent decision in Howard v. McLucas, 782 F.2d 956 (11th Cir.1986), wherein we recognized the difficulties inherent in applying the standard test for determining timeliness of intervention to cases like this one and allowed a group of affected white and non-black employees to intervene to challenge the promotional provisions of a consent decree nearly ten years after suit had been filed. See id. at 959-61.
The principal case on timeliness of intervention in similar suits that was available to intervenors when they decided to attempt to intervene was Stallworth v. Monsanto Co., 558 F.2d 257 (5th Cir.1977). In that case, the former Fifth Circuit set forth the four factor test for determining timeliness of intervention that was later applied in Jefferson County, Reeves and Howard v. McLucas. Although Stallworth, in allowing intervention, informed potential in-tervenors who would seek to upset consent decrees of the factors that would be considered significant in determining whether such intervention was timely, it hardly foreclosed as untimely the claim made by intervenors in this case.
In particular, nothing in Stallworth required the court in Reeves to apply the four factor timeliness test without regard to the limited nature of the intervention that was sought. The Reeves court applied the four factor test to require intervention even by persons who are satisfied with a consent decree as drafted and approved as soon as practicable after it appears that they might someday perceive their interests to be adversely affected by the parties’ failure to act in accordance with the terms of the decree. Where potential intervenors are satisfied with a decree, however, I would not require them to intervene immediately upon learning of the terms of the decree simply because they might someday be dissatisfied if the parties fail to enforce and abide by the terms of the decree. If potential intervenors are willing to confine their later intervention to a claim that is, in essence, a claim that their rights are being violated because the decree is not being *1487implemented in accordance with its terms, requiring them to intervene as soon as they learn of the terms of the decree seems to suffer vices closely analogous to those the Stallworth court recognized when considering whether the institution of suit should be the critical event in determining timeliness of intervention:
[A] rule making knowledge of the pend-ency of the litigation the critical event would be unsound because it would induce both too much and too little intervention. It would encourage individuals to seek intervention at a time when they ordinarily can possess only a small amount of information concerning the character and potential ramifications of the lawsuit, and when the probability that they will misjudge the need for intervention is correspondingly high. Often the protective step of seeking intervention will later prove to have been unnecessary, and the result will be needless prejudice to the existing parties and the would-be intervenor if his motion is granted, and purposeless appeals if the motion is denied. In either event, scarce judicial resources would be squandered, and the litigation costs of the parties would be increased. Such a rule would also mean that many individuals who excusably failed to appreciate the significance of a suit at the time it was filed would be barred from intervening to protect their interests when its importance became apparent to them later on. These effects would be inconsistent with the important purposes of Rule 24: to foster economy of judicial administration and to protect non-parties from having their interests adversely affected by litigation conducted without their participation.
Stallworth, 558 F.2d at 264-65.
These are not frivolous concerns, nor was it unreasonable of the intervenors in this case to consider it quite possible that this court would be motivated by such concerns to decide that the Stallworth test should not be applied as it was in Reeves, but instead should be applied with some sensitivity to the nature of the intervention sought. The resulting analysis still might have resulted in a denial of intervention as untimely, but the intervenors’ claim surely would not look as “frivolous,” in hindsight, as it perhaps does now when the opinion in Reeves is read without considering the possible significance of this difference between the facts of Reeves and the cases on which it relied. Although it is the law of this case that intervention should not have been allowed, I find the conclusion inescapable that intervenors’ claim to intervention in this novel case was not frivolous because untimely, and that attorney’s fees should not be assessed against them on that ground.