Court Opinion

ID: 9473237
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:23:32.467834+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:24.086674
License: Public Domain

ALDISERT, Chief Judge,
concurring.
At the turn of the century, the great master Holmes gave a definition of law: “The prophecies of what the court will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” Holmes, Path of the Law, 10 Harv.L.Rev. 457, 460-61 (1897). This observation is as viable today as when Holmes first uttered it. Predictability in the law, or in Karl Llewellyn’s phrase, “reckonability,” must exist so that private persons and public agencies, the legal profession, and trial courts may be able to plan affairs accordingly, give proper advice, and decide cases in accordance with reasonably understandable principles.
A dispassionate examination of the interpretations of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) clause disallowing recovery of attorney’s fees payments from the United States when the government is “substantially justified,” 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d)(1)(A), convinces me that there is neither predictability nor reckonability to the case law. In the final analysis, notwithstanding reams of writing and analysis, this single phrase, “substantially justified”, comes down to this: the clause means only what a particular judge wants it to mean. To draw upon an old analogy, we are deciding attorney’s fees cases “on the length of the chancellor’s foot.”
Much discussion in this court’s opinions seeks to find a foothold on the slippery slopes, but the bottom line seems to be that we always reverse denials of attorney’s fees. I can appreciate the frustrations of the district courts, who justifiably can ask, “Do we do what the Court of Appeals does, or what it saysV’
Distilled to its essence, the following are the few principles we have to guide our decisions:
1. The United States’ position is evaluated by its posture before the agency as well as before the court. Natural Resources Defense Council v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 703 F.2d 700, 706-12 (3d Cir.1983).
2. Substantial justification is a middle ground between an automatic award to the prevailing party and an award made only when the government’s position was frivolous. Id. at 719 (Hunter, J., concurring and dissenting).
3. The government has a strong burden of proving substantial justification; this burden is not satisfied because the government can point to “some evidence” in its favor. Id. at 712.
See also Tressler v. Heckler, 748 F.2d 146 (3d Cir.1984); Citizens Council of Delaware County v. Brinegar, 741 F.2d 584 (3d Cir.1984); Dougherty v. Lehman, 711 F.2d 555 (3d Cir.1983). Whatever value these statements have in other cases, I find they provide little direction on how to decide the attorney’s fees question when the claimant prevails because the court finds that no *969substantial evidence supports the Secretary’s position.
Probably the most unfortunate aspect of this problem is that litigation continues to fulminate and opinions to disseminate, even though the Equal Access to Justice Act has expired and we are awaiting a new Congressional and Executive mandate. Conscious that we are dealing with an expired statute, and based on the bottom line dispositions of this court in Social Security cases, I advocate one single test by which a court may grant attorney’s fees to a Social Security claimant on the ground that there was no substantial evidence on the record supporting the Secretary’s position. I would hold as a matter of law that, absent truly extraordinary circumstances, in each such case the position of the United States was not substantially justified. I generally would obey the admonition of Dougherty prohibiting automatic awards in most attorney’s fees cases, but nevertheless carve out a neat exception in the typical substantial evidence case.
I think that such a rule would make sense, would provide explicit direction, and would avoid unfortunate decisions where, as in this case, the majority opinion makes a scholarly and analytical justification of its position, notwithstanding an equally scholarly and analytical opinion of the district court that takes a contrary view. As it stands today, “substantially justified” is too amorphous, too fluid, and too devoid of direction to guide the legal profession and the courts in cases where the claimant prevails because no substantial evidence in the record sustained the agency’s position.
The nature of the problem really admits to no other solution. If the claimant wins because a court determines as a matter of law that there was not substantial evidence, there can be no gradations to his or her victory. I cannot parse this legal determination in metaphysical terms. I do not find myself able to say, for example, that in given cases, there was almost substantial evidence, but we cannot find it, or that the question is close but we decide that the evidence was not there, or that only a wee bit of the evidence existed, but not enough. The legal profession and our judicial tradition are disserved when a court’s analysis begins with a lack of evidence determination and then proceeds by rationalization, and not ratiocination, to try to explain when the claimant may or may not obtain attorney’s fees.
Although I offer this as my own solution to a vexing problem, I do so with full recognition that this view is supported by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, the committee that served as the principal sponsor of the Equal Access to Justice Act when it first was introduced in Congress. I also am quick to recognize that the views of the committee to which I am about to refer are post-enactment views and therefore do not have the same bite as pre-enactment statements. I am aware, for example, of the explicit language of the Supreme Court discussing “subsequent legislative history”:
But post-passage remarks of legislators, however explicit, cannot serve to change the legislative intent of Congress expressed before the Act’s passage. See, e.g., United States v. Mine Workers of America, 330 U.S. 258, 282 [67 S.Ct. 677, 690, 91 L.Ed. 884] (1947). Such statements “represent only the personal views of these legislators, since the statements were [made] after passage of the Act.” National Woodwork Manufacturers Assn. v. NLRB, 386 U.S. 612, 639 n. 34 [87 S.Ct. 1250, 1265 n. 34, 18 L.Ed.2d 357] (1967).
Regional Rail Reorganization Act Cases, 419 U.S. 102, 132, 95 S.Ct. 335, 353, 42 L.Ed.2d 320 (1974).
What is especially important, however, is that nothing in the original legislative history of the EAJA contradicts what was contained in the later report of the committee chaired by Congressman Robert Kas-tenmeier, who also chaired the original subcommittee of the Judiciary at the time the EAJA was enacted into law. I believe that the originating committee’s views cannot be ignored when its post-enactment explanatory statements do not contradict, but *970merely clarify, pre-enactment congressional intention. In reporting out the 1984 amendments to the Act (later passed by Congress but vetoed by the President for other reasons), the House Judiciary Committee commented on judicial activity interpreting “substantially justified”:
Especially puzzling, however, have been statements by some courts that an administrative decision may be substantially justified under the Act even if it must be reversed because it ... was not supported by substantial evidence. Agency action found to be ... unsupported by substantial evidence is virtually certain not to have been substantially justified under the Act. Only the most extraordinary special circumstances could permit such an action to be found to be substantially justified under the Act.
H.R.Rep. No. 992, 98th Cong., 2d. Sess. 7 (1984) (emphasis supplied) (footnote omitted).
Moreover, Justice Rehnquist has reminded us that
[t]he report of a joint conference committee of both Houses of Congress, for example, or the report of a Senate or House committee, is accorded a good deal more weight than the remarks even of the sponsor of a particular portion of a bill on the floor of the chamber. See e.g., Chandler v. Roudebush, 425 U.S. 840, 858 n. 36 [96 S.Ct. 1949, 1958 n. 36,48 L.Ed.2d 416] (1976); United States v. Automobile Workers, 352 U.S. 567, 585-586 [77 S.Ct. 529, 538,1 L.Ed.2d 563] (1957).
Simpson v. United States, 435 U.S. 6, 17, 98 S.Ct. 909, 915, 55 L.Ed.2d 70 (1978) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).
I mention the authority of Congressman Kastenmeier’s committee report only to buttress my solution to this problem, and not as an attempt to suggest that the post-enactment legislative history compels the result, given the Supreme Court’s discussion in the Regional Rail Reorganization Act cases. I believe that this formula will bring stability and predictability to the law, serve a valid public purpose, and avoid highly abtruse and abstract judicial decision making.
For these reasons, because the claimant was successful on the substantial evidence issue, and finding no exceptional circumstances, I concur in the court’s judgment.1

. I agree with the majority that interpreting the statutory phrase "substantially justified" is a question of law for which there is plenary review.