Court Opinion

ID: 9439118
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 06:22:14.172633+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:26:10.010683
License: Public Domain

WALD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I disagree with the panel that under Land-graf and Lindh because “the work at issue was not done until after passage” of section 803(d) of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (“PLRA”), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(d), “[t]he attorneys did not possess a right to payment ... and thus had no settled expectations [of payment],” Majority Opinion (“Maj. Op.”) at 1361. In the panel’s view, the mere fact that the services in question had been performed after the fee cap went into effect meant that the lawyers would not be retroactively hurt even though these services were performed on a case initially undertaken long before the *1362Act. While I agree with the majority that the statutory language is not “plain” as to whether Congress meant to apply section 1997e(d) to pending actions and that the legislative history is ambiguous as well, I do not believe under Landgraf s mandate the panel is entitled to ignore the presumption against retroactive application of a law when “manifest injustice” will result and adopt, as it did, an a priori reasoning that imposing the fee cap on any work performed after the Act’s passage does not constitute a retroactive application.1
The Supreme Court in Landgraf v. USI Film Products, 511 U.S. 244, 114 S.Ct. 1483, 128 L.Ed.2d 229 (1994), cautioned against drawing cursory conclusions about retroactivity based solely on when the conduct immediately affected by the law in question occurred. As to conduct preceding the passage of the law, the Court admonished:
A statute does not operate “retrospectively” merely because it is applied in a case arising from conduct antedating the statute’s enactment ... or upsets expectations based in prior law. Rather, the court must ask whether the new provision attaches new legal consequences to events completed before its enactment. The conclusions that a particular rule operates “retroactively” comes at the end of a process of judgment concerning the nature and extent of the change in the law and the degree of connection between the operation of the new rule and a relevant past event.
Id. at 269-70, 114 S.Ct. 1483 (citations omitted) (footnotes omitted), quoted in LaFontant v. Immigration & Naturalization Service, 135 F.3d 158, 161 (D.C.Cir.1998). This caution surely applies as well to conduct occurring temporally after the law is in effect but which is an inextricable part of a course of conduct initiated prior to the law. Ac-knowledgedly, whether section 1997e(d) “attaches new legal consequences to events completed before its enactment” depends in large part on the answer to the basic question of whether attorney’s fee statutes regulate conduct that is merely secondary or ancillary to the parties’ conduct, or whether such laws have real impact on the legal rights the parties. See Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 275 & n. 29, 114 S.Ct. 1483. This has been said to present a “closet 1 question.” Id. at 289, 114 S.Ct. 1483 (Scalia, J., concurring). But I believe that the fee-shifting provision under which this case has been litigated, 42 U.S.C. § 1988 — which is designed to facilitate the litigation of worthy civil rights violations — gives rise to a strong argument that the triggering event for retroactivity purposes is when the lawyer undertakes to litigate the civil rights action on behalf of the client. Thus a subsequent radical change in the law as to the lawyer’s eligibility, if successful, to collect fees computed in a particular manner for his services does indeed constitute “new legal consequences to events completed before ... enactment.”
An important characteristic of the Court’s retroactivity analysis is that it is capacious and flexible enough to account for the circumstances of each particular case. See Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U.S. 320, 117 S.Ct. 2059, 2063, 138 L.Ed.2d 481 (1997) (“In sum, if the application of a term would be retroactive as to Lindh, the term will not be applied, even if, in the absence of a retroactive effect, we might find the term applicable....”); United States v. Ortiz, 136 F.3d 161, 166 (D.C.Cir.1998) (circuits addressing potential retroactivity of AEDPA’s amendments to section 2255 “share in their approaches [ ] the requirement that the new enactment be retroactive as applied to the particular claim before the court”). Equity and fairness are also to be considered in the analysis. The Court in Bradley v. School Board of Rich*1363mond, 416 U.S. 696, 94 S.Ct. 2006, 40 L.Ed.2d 476 (1974), applied a new fee-shifting provision of the Education Amendments of 1972 to a pending school desegregation case based largely on these principles. The district court in Bradley had already exercised its equitable authority to award attorney’s fees to the plaintiffs in that case, and “as [the Court’s] opinion in Bradley made clear, it would be difficult to imagine a stronger equitable case for an attorney’s fee award than a lawsuit in which the plaintiff parents would otherwise have to bear the costs of desegregating their children’s public schools.” Landgraf, 511 U.S. at 277, 114 S.Ct. 1483.
The plaintiffs make a strong case here that application of section 1997e(d) to work performed after April 24, 1996, is impermissibly retroactive. Section 1988 is a keystone in the enforcement scheme of our civil rights laws. Section 1988 “was no doubt intended to encourage litigation protecting civil rights.” Kay v. Ehrler, 499 U.S. 432, 436, 111 S.Ct. 1435, 113 L.Ed.2d 486 (1991). As stated in the Senate Report accompanying passage of section 1988, “All of these civil rights laws depend heavily on private enforcement, and fee awards have proved an essential remedy if private citizens are to have a meaningful opportunity to vindicate the important Congressional policies which these laws contain.” S.Rep. No. 94-1011, at 2 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5908, 5910. This surely calls for a closer examination of the effects wrought by section 1997e(d) on the prisoners’ legal rights than the majority has undertaken. See also Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424, 444, 103 S.Ct. 1933, 76 L.Ed.2d 40 (1989) (Brennan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (“In enacting section 1988, Congress rejected the traditional assumption that private choices whether to litigate, compromise, or forgo a potential claim will yield a socially desirable level of enforcement as far as the enumerated civil rights statutes are concerned.”); Copeland v. Marshall, 641 F.2d 880, 895 (D.C.Cir.1980) (parallel fee provision in Title VII must be interpreted broadly because “the prospect of liability for an attorney’s fee may help deter discrimination”) (footnote omitted); Ortiz v. Regan, 980 F.2d 138, 140 (2d Cir.1992) (section 1988 “was designed to allow private individuals a meaningful opportunity to vindicate civil rights violations”); Seattle School Dist. No. 1 v. State of Washington, 633 F.2d 1338, 1348 (9th Cir.1980) (“The congressional purpose in providing attorney’s fees in civil rights cases was to eliminate financial barriers to the vindication of constitutional rights and to stimulate voluntary compliance with the law.”).
The two prisoners’ cases before us now have been in litigation for a combined total of 50 years. The prisoners’ lawyers became eligible for attorneys’ fees when section 1988 was made applicable to the District of Columbia in 1979, and they have consistently received fee awards at market rates for work performed from 1983 onward. Much of this work has grown out of the lawyers’ dogged efforts to monitor the District’s compliance with a series of stipulated orders that the parties undertook beginning in 1984. The Rules of Professional Conduct, see D.C. Rules of Prof. Conduct 1.16(b), preclude lawyers from withdrawing from a case in midstream except under extraordinary circumstances. It follows that once section 1988 was passed, a rational plaintiffs’ lawyer anticipating a long and time-intensive case involving lengthy monitoring and compliance negotiations would have had to have expectations that if he prevailed for his clients he would be paid on the reasonable basis set out in that statute. Ethical high-grade representation of a class of civil rights plaintiffs, especially prisoners, does not, consist of a series of discrete legal services that can be stopped and started again at any time, but rather a continuous responsibility to see the litigation through to its natural conclusion. In that very real sense, the PLRA has changed the rules of the game midstream and unsettled settled expectations of both lawyers and clients. Thus I agree with the learned district judge that in the absence of a clear congressional intent, the cap should not be applied to post-PLRA work undertaken to complete a legal obligation entered into prior to the law. In sum, application of the PLRA’s limitations on attorneys’ fees to legal services performed after the PLRA’s enact*1364ment on a case undertaken prior to the Act does attach retroactively “new legal consequences to events completed before its enactment” — both for the parties and the lawyers. I therefore respectfully dissent.

. My own reading of section 1997e(d), like the district court’s, would confine it to cases brought after the passage of the Act. I note section 1997e(a) (dealing with exhaustion) speaks of an action which "shall be brought” and although the section most relevant here, 1997e(d)(l), uses "any action brought,” I think it strained to conclude that (d)(1) is meant to apply to pending cases while (a) clearly is not. Section 1997e(d)(3) speaks of an award "in an action described in paragraph (1),” a limiting clause that would seem unnecessary if any post-Act award in a prisoner case were to be covered by the cap. In any case, I agree basically with Hadix v. Johnson, 143 F.3d 246 (6th Cir.1998), construing this section not to apply to cases already ongoing in the courts.