Court Opinion

ID: 9493541
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:11:14.925365+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:53.897455
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
This case presents two intertwined, yet independent, issues that we must address: 1) whether the district court had jurisdiction to award attorneys’ fees to The Steel Company; and 2) whether The Steel Company was entitled to attorneys’ fees as a “prevailing party” under the Emergency Planning and Right-To-Know Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 11001-50. My colleagues present a thoughtful analysis of these two issues. We are not in disagreement with respect to the result or with respect to the basic analysis. I agree that the district court had jurisdiction to award attorneys’ fees, that The Steel Company meets the requirements for a prevailing party under the Act, but that fees are not appropriate in the present action by virtue of the rule set forth in Christiansburg Garment Co. v. EEOC, 434 U.S. 412, 98 S.Ct. 694, 54 L.Ed.2d 648 (1978). I write separately simply to emphasize how our decision today squares with our earlier precedent.
In my view, our court’s analysis in Szabo Food Service v. Canteen Corporation, 823 F.2d 1073 (7th Cir.1987), is especially helpful in understanding the scope of today’s holding and in distinguishing it from other recent cases. In Szabo Food Service, thi£ court identified the different meanings of “lack of jurisdiction.” The first category we identified was “the image of subject matter jurisdiction.” We stated:
If one citizen of Illinois files a suit based on state law against another citizen of Illinois, a federal court lacks jurisdiction over the subject matter; so too if a plaintiff files a specious civil rights suit, for an absurd complaint does not even invoke federal question jurisdiction. Yet a court has jurisdiction to determine its jurisdiction and therefore may engage in all the usual judicial acts, even though it has no power to decide the case on the merits. It may supervise discovery, hold a trial, and order the payment of costs at the end. If the complaint is indeed too silly to create subject matter jurisdiction, attorneys’ fees should be an ordinary incident of the award of costs.
Id. at 1077-78 (citations omitted). The second sense of “lack of jurisdiction” was when a court “has lost [its] power to proceed, even though the case is within the federal judicial power.” Id. at 1078. This second jurisdictional category most often comes into play when a court has entered a final judgment; in those circumstances, a court loses its ability to consider the merits of the action, but does “not also lose power to award attorneys’ fees that may be in order as a result of what happened before the final decision.” Id. at 1078. Finally, we discussed “a third ‘jurisdictional’ analogy [that] rests on the case or controversy requirement of Article III.” Id. “When the plaintiff packs up his portfolio and goes home,” we stated, “the case goes home with him.... Courts occasionally sum up the effect of the missing plaintiff by stating ...: ‘It is as if the suit had never been brought.’ A court could not award attorneys’ fees in a case that had never begun.... ” Id. (citations omitted).
Our case law since Szabo Food Service has adhered to these categories. For example, in Board of Education v. Nathan R, 199 F.3d 377 (7th Cir.), cert, denied, - U.S. -, 121 S.Ct. 65, 148 L.Ed.2d 30 (2000), we held that we could not consider an award of fees against a school corporation for deprivation of spe*933cial education services when the action had been mooted by the student’s graduation from high school. In those circumstances, “[b]ecause we would need to consider the merits to determine whether the Parents are prevailing parties, we agree[d] that we [could] not decide whether the Parents would be entitled to attorneys’ fees from the proceedings in the district court.” Id. at 381. In essence, we determined that a mooted case most closely resembles the third Szabo Food Service category; because we no longer had a controversy to decide, we could not determine issues, such as attorneys’ fees, that were dependent upon our having decided the underlying controversy. See Lewis v. Continental Bank Corp., 494 U.S. 472, 480, 110 S.Ct. 1249, 108 L.Ed.2d 400 (1990); see also Rhodes v. Stewart, 488 U.S. 1, 109 S.Ct. 202, 102 L.Ed.2d 1 (1988).
The situation in the present case is more closely akin to the first Szabo Food Service category. Here, there is no question that the district court, this court, and the Supreme Court, had the authority to receive briefs, to hear argument, and to consider the issue of whether there was federal jurisdiction to resolve the merits of the underlying controversy; the courts involved had jurisdiction to determine their jurisdiction. From the authority to determine its jurisdiction necessarily flows the power of the court to award attorneys’ fees based on the actions properly before it. Consequently, the district court had the authority to award fees arising from the actions of the parties in the course of resolving the jurisdictional issue. As my colleagues point out, this court’s decision in Charles v. Daley, 846 F.2d 1057 (7th Cir. 1988), points the way..
The question remains, however, whether attorneys’ fees are available to The Steel Company. This inquiry requires that we decide whether it has prevailed for purposes of the Act. With respect to this issue, as my colleagues point out, the decision of the Supreme Court in Texas State Teachers Association v. Garland Independent School District, 489 U.S. 782, 109 S.Ct. 1486, 103 L.Ed.2d 866 (1989), is instructive. In that case the Court addressed the issue of when a plaintiff might be considered a “prevailing party” for purposes of 42 U.S.C. § 1988. The Court stated that “[i]f the plaintiff has succeeded on ‘any significant issue in litigation which achieve[d] some of the benefit the parties sought in bringing suit,’ the plaintiff has crossed the threshold to a fee award of some kind.” Id at 791-92, 109 S.Ct. 1486; see also Hewitt v. Helms, 482 U.S. 755, 107 S.Ct. 2672, 96 L.Ed.2d 654 (1987). Here, CBE brought suit to collect fees from The Steel Company for failure to make required disclosures under the Act. The Steel Company, for its part, sought to prevent CBE from collecting those fees; one of the bases upon which it defended the action was to challenge CBE’s standing to bring the action. The Supreme Court agreed with The Steel Company that CBE lacked standing; its decision therefore foreclosed CBE’s recovery of fees. In the words of the Supreme Court, The Steel Company prevailed on a “significant issue in litigation” — CBE’s standing, which achieved for The Steel Company the only benefit that it could derive in defending the action. Consequently, The Steel Company is a prevailing party for purposes of the Act.
As my colleagues hold, however, our analysis does not end here. I agree with my colleagues that § 11046(f) incorporates the standard of Christiansburg Garment Co. v. EEOC, 434 U.S. 412, 98 S.Ct. 694, 54 L.Ed.2d 648 (1978), and that standard precludes The Steel Company from • recovering in the present action.