Court Opinion

ID: 9430632
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:30:14.738007+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:25.378258
License: Public Domain

Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice, Justice White, and Justice O’Connor join, dissenting.
In Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U. S. 424, 433 (1983), our leading case dealing with attorney’s fees awarded pursuant to 42 U. S. C. § 1988, we said that “[t]he most useful starting point for determining the amount of a reasonable fee is the number of hours reasonably expended on the litigation multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate.” As if we had foreseen the case now before us, we went on to emphasize that “[t]he district court. . . should exclude from this initial fee calculation hours that were not ‘reasonably expended’ ” on the litigation. Id., at 434, quoting S. Rep. No. 94-1011, p. 6 (1976). Today, despite its adoption of a revisionist interpretation of Hensley, the plurality nonetheless acknowledges that “Hensley requires a fee applicant to exercise ‘billing judgment’ not because he should necessarily be compensated for less than the actual number of hours spent litigating a case, but because the hours he does seek compensation for must be reasonable” Ante, at 569, n. 4 (emphasis in original). I see no escape from the conclusion that the District Court’s finding that respondents’ attorneys “reasonably” spent 1,946.75 hours to recover a money judgment of $33,350 is clearly erroneous, and that therefore the District Court’s award of $245,456.25 in attorney’s fees to respondents should be reversed. The Court’s affirmance of the fee award emasculates the principles laid down in Hensley, and turns § 1988 into a relief Act for lawyers.
*589A brief look at the history of this case reveals just how “unreasonable” it was for respondents’ lawyers to spend so much time on it. Respondents filed their initial complaint in 1976, seeking injunctive and declaratory relief and compensatory and punitive damages from the city of Riverside, its Chief of Police, and 30 police officers, based on 256 separate claims allegedly arising out of the police breakup of a single party. Prior to trial, 17 of the police officers were dismissed from the case on motions for summary judgment, and respondents dropped their requests for injunctive and declaratory relief. More significantly, respondents also dropped their original allegation that the police had acted with discriminatory intent. The action proceeded to trial, and the jury completely exonerated nine additional police officers. Respondents ultimately prevailed against only the city and five police officers on various § 1983, false arrest and imprisonment, and common negligence claims. No restraining orders or injunctions were ever issued against petitioners, nor was the city ever compelled to change a single practice or policy as a result of respondents’ suit. The jury awarded respondents a total of $33,350 in compensatory and punitive damages. Only about one-third of this total, or $13,300, was awarded to respondents based on violations of their federal constitutional rights.
Respondents then filed a request for $495,713.51 in attorney’s fees, representing approximately 15 times the amount of the underlying money judgment. In April 1981, the District Court made its initial fee award of $245,456.25, declining to apply respondents’ requested “multiplier,” but awarding, to the penny, the entire “lodestar” claimed by respondents and their attorneys. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, Rivera v. City of Riverside, 679 F. 2d 795 (1982). We granted certio-rari, vacated, and remanded, 461 U. S. 952 (1983), in light of Hensley, supra. On remand, the District Court convened a hearing, at which the court promptly announced: “I tell you now that I will not change the award. I will simply go back and be more specific about it.” App. 230. The court ulti*590mately proved true to its word. After reviewing the record and the submissions of the parties, the court convened a second hearing, at which it approved exactly the same award as before: $245,456.25 in attorney’s fees. The only noticeable change was that, the second time around, the court created a better “paper trail” by including in its order a discussion of those factors in Hensley and Johnson v. Georgia Highway Express, Inc., 488 F. 2d 714 (CA5 1974), which it believed supported such a huge fee award. See App. 187-192. The Ninth Circuit again affirmed, 763 F. 2d 1580 (1985).
It is obvious to me that the District Court viewed Hensley not as a constraint on its'discretion, but instead as a blueprint for justifying, in an after-the-fact fashion, a fee award it had already decided to enter solely on the basis of the “lodestar.” In fact, the District Court failed at almost every turn to apply any kind of “billing judgment,” or to seriously consider the “results obtained,” which we described in Hensley as “the important factor” in determining a “reasonable” fee award. 461 U. S., at 434. A few examples should suffice: (1) The court approved almost 209 hours of “prelitigation time,” for a total of $26,118.75. (2) The court approved some 197 hours of time spent in conversations between respondents’ two attorneys, for a total of $24,625. (3) The court approved 143 hours for preparation of a pretrial order, for a total of $17,875. (4) Perhaps most egregiously, the court approved 45.50 hours of “stand-by time,” or time spent by one of respondents’ attorneys, who was then based in San Diego, to wait in a Los Angeles hotel room for a jury verdict to be rendered in Los Angeles, where his co-counsel was then employed by the U. C. L. A. School of Law, less than 40 minutes’ driving time from the courthouse. The award for “stand-by time” totaled $5,687.50. I find it hard to understand how any attorney can be said to have exercised “billing judgment” in spending such huge amounts of time on a case ultimately worth only $33,350.
*591Indeed, on the basis of some of the statements made by the District Court in this case, I reluctantly conclude that the court may have attempted to make up to respondents in attorney’s fees what it felt the jury had wrongfully withheld from them in damages. As the court noted in its opinion, apparently believing that the observation supported the entry of a huge award of attorney’s fees:
“[T]he size of the jury award resulted from (a) the general reluctance of jurors to make large awards against police officers, and (b) the dignified restraint which the plaintiffs exercised in describing their injuries to the jury. For example, although some of the actions of the police would clearly have been insulting and humiliating to even the most insensitive person and were, in the opinion of the Court, intentionally so, plaintiffs did not attempt to play up this aspect of the case.” App. 188-189.
But a district court,, in awarding attorney’s fees under § 1988, does not sit to retry questions submitted to and decided by the jury. If jurors are reluctant to make large awards against police officers, this is a fact of life that plaintiffs, defendants, and district courts must live with, and a district court simply has no business trying to correct what it regards as an unfortunate tendency in the award of damages by granting inflated attorney’s fees.
The analysis of whether the extraordinary number of hours put in by respondents’ attorneys in this case was “reasonable” must be made in light of both the traditional billing practices in the profession, and the fundamental principle that the award of a “reasonable” attorney’s fee under § 1988 means a fee that would have been deemed reasonable if billed to affluent plaintiffs by their own attorneys. This latter principle was stressed in the legislative history of § 1988, see *592S. Rep. No. 94-1011, p. 6 (1976),* and by this Court in Hensley:
“Counsel for the prevailing party should make a good-faith effort to exclude from a fee request hours that are excessive, redundant, or otherwise unnecessary, just as a lawyer in private practice ethically is obligated to exclude such hours from his fee submission. ‘In the private sector, “billing judgment” is an important component in fee setting. It is no less important here. Hours that are not properly billed to one’s client also are not properly billed to one’s adversary pursuant to statutory authority.’” 461 U. S., at 434, quoting Copeland v. Marshall, 205 U. S. App. D. C. 390, 401, 641 F. 2d 880, 891 (1980) (en banc) (emphasis in original).
I think that this analysis, which appears nowhere in the plurality’s opinion, leads inexorably to the conclusion that the District Court’s fee award of $245,456.25, based on a prevailing hourly rate of $125 multiplied by the number of hours which respondents’ attorneys claim to have spent on the case, is not a “reasonable” attorney’s fee under § 1988.
Suppose that A offers to sell Blackacre to B for $10,000. It is commonly known and accepted that Blackacre has a fair market value of $10,000. B consults an attorney and requests a determination whether A can convey good title to Blackacre. The attorney writes an elaborate memorandum concluding that A’s title to Blackacre is defective, and submits a bill to B for $25,000. B refuses to pay the bill, the attorney sues, and the parties stipulate that the attorney spent 200 hours researching the title issue because of an extraordinarily complex legal and factual situation, and that *593the prevailing rate at which the attorney billed, which was also a “reasonable” rate, was $125. Does anyone seriously think that a court should award the attorney the full $25,000 which he claims? Surely a court would start from the proposition that, unless special arrangements were made between the client and the attorney, a “reasonable” attorney’s fee for researching the title to a piece of property worth $10,000 could not exceed the value of the property. Otherwise the client would have been far better off never going to an attorney in the first place, and simply giving A $10,000 for a worthless deed. The client thereby would have saved himself $15,000.
Obviously the billing situation in a typical litigated case is more complex than in this bedrock example of a defective title claim, but some of the same principles are surely applicable. If A has a claim for contract damages in the amount of $10,000 against B, and retains an attorney to prosecute the claim, it would be both extraordinary and unjustifiable, in the absence of any special arrangement, for the attorney to put in 200 hours on the case and send the client a bill for $25,000. Such a bill would be “unreasonable,” regardless of whether A obtained a judgment against B for $10,000 or obtained a take-nothing judgment. And in such a case, where the prospective recovery is limited, it is exactly this “billing judgment” which enables the parties to achieve a settlement; any competent attorney, whether prosecuting or defending a contract action for $10,000, would realize that the case simply cannot justify a fee in excess of the potential recovery on the part of either the plaintiff’s or the defendant’s attorney. All of these examples illuminate the point made in Hensley that “the important factor” in determining a “reasonable” fee is the “results obtained.” 461 U. S., at 434. The very “reasonableness” of the hours expended on a case by a plaintiff’s attorney necessarily will depend, to a large extent, on the amount that may reasonably be expected to be recovered if the plaintiff prevails.
*594The amount of damages which a jury is likely to award in a tort case is of course more difficult to predict than the amount it is likely to award in a contract case. But even in a tort case some measure of the kind of “billing judgment” previously described must be brought to bear in computing a “reasonable” attorney’s fee. Again, a hypothetical example will illustrate the point. If, at the time respondents filed their lawsuit in 1976, there had been in the Central District of California a widely publicized survey of jury verdicts in this type of civil rights action which showed that successful plaintiffs recovered between $10,000 and $75,000 in damages, could it possibly be said that it would have been “reasonable” for respondents’ attorneys to put in on the case hours which, when multiplied by the attorneys’ prevailing hourly rate, would result in an attorney’s fee of over $245,000? In the absence of such a survey, it might be more difficult for a plaintiff’s attorney to accurately estimate the amount of damages likely to be recovered, but this does not absolve the attorney of the responsibility for making such an estimate and using it as a guide in the exercise of “billing judgment.”
In the context of § 1988, there would obviously be some exceptions to the general rules of “billing judgment” which I have been discussing, but none of these exceptions are applicable here. If the litigation is unnecessarily prolonged by the bad-faith conduct of the defendants, or if the litigation produces significant, identifiable benefits for persons other than the plaintiffs, then the purpose of Congress in authorizing attorney’s fees under § 1988 should allow a larger award of attorney’s fees than would be “reasonable” where the only relief is the recovery of monetary damages by individual plaintiffs. Nor do we deal here with a case such as Carey v. Piphus, 435 U. S. 247, 266 (1978), in which the deprivation of a constitutional right necessarily results in only nominal pecuniary damages. See S. Rep. No. 94-1011, supra, at 6 (fee awards under § 1988 should “not be reduced because the rights involved may be nonpecuniary in nature”). Here, re*595spondents successfully claimed both compensatory and punitive damages for false arrest and imprisonment, negligence, and violations of their constitutional rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and the jury assessed damages as juries do in such cases. In short, this case shares none of the special aspects of certain civil rights litigation which the plurality suggests, in Part III of its opinion, would justify an award of attorney’s fees totally divorced from the amount of damages awarded by the jury.
The plurality, ante, Part III, at 573-574, explains the position advanced by petitioner and the United States concerning fee awards in a case such as this, and then goes on to “reject the proposition that fee awards under § 1988 should necessarily be proportionate to the amount of damages a civil rights plaintiff actually recovers.” Ante, at 574. I agree with the plurality that the importation of the contingent-fee model to govern fee awards under §1988 is not warranted by the terms and legislative history of the statute. But I do not agree with the plurality if it means to reject the kind of “proportionality” that I have previously described. Nearly 2,000 attorney-hours spent on a case in which the total recovery was only $33,000, in which only $13,300 of that amount was recovered for the federal claims, and in which the District Court expressed the view that, in such cases, juries typically were reluctant to award substantial damages against police officers, is simply not a “reasonable” expenditure of time. The snippets of legislative history which the plurality relies upon to dismiss any relationship between the amount of time put in on a case and the amount of damages awarded are wholly unconvincing. One may agree with all of the glowing rhetoric contained in the plurality’s opinion about Congress’ noble purpose in authorizing attorney’s fees under §1988 without concluding that Congress intended to turn attorneys loose to spend as many hours as possible to prepare and try a case that could reasonably be expected to result only in a relatively minor award of monetary damages.
*596In Hensley, we noted that “complex civil rights litigation involving numerous challenges to institutional practices or conditions” might well require “many hours of lawyers’ services,” and thus justify a large award of attorney’s fees. 461 U. S., at 436. This case is a far cry from the situation we referred to in Hensley. I would reverse the judgment of the Ninth Circuit affirming the District Court’s award of attorney’s fees, and remand the case to the District Court for re-computation of the fee award in fight of both Hensley and the principles set forth in this opinion.

 “In computing the fee, counsel for prevailing parties should be paid, as is traditional with attorneys compensated by a fee-paying client, ‘for all time reasonably expended on a matter.’” S. Rep. No. 94-1011, p. 6 (1976) (emphasis added), quoting Van Davis v. County of Los Angeles, 8 EPD ¶ 9444 (CD Cal. 1974); Stanford Daily v. Zurcher, 64 F. R. D. 680, 684 (ND Cal. 1974).