Opinion analysis
By Amy Howe
on the 25th of February 2025
At. 15.01
The court made decisions in Glossip v. Oklahoma and Lackey v. Stinnie Tuesday morning. (Katie Barlow)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave up that a group of Virginia drivers who contested a State Motor Vehicle Act did not have the right to repay their attorney’s fees, even if a federal court issued a ruling in their favor that temporarily prohibited the state from enforcing the law and state legislature canceled the law . In a vote of 7-2, the court found that the drivers are not “prevailing parties” for a federal law giving the winners in some civil rights cases the opportunity to recover reasonable lawyers.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson disseminated after an opinion with Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The case began in 2018 as a challenge for the constitutionalness of a Virginia law that requires automatic suspension of driver’s licenses for anyone with unpaid court fines and fees. As a federal court in Virginia met the driver’s request for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the state from enforcing the law while the trial continued, the state did not appeal.
In April 2020, Virginia legislation canceled the law and demanded that DMV permanently reintroduced the licenses for drivers suspended under the law. It prompted the right to reject the case as a moot – that is, no longer a living controversy.
In most lawsuits in the United States, each side pays for its own lawyer. But in 1976, Congress adopted the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards ACT, which gives courts in some civil rights cases to award a “reasonable lawyer’s fee” to “the ruling party.”
The drivers tried to recover their lawyer’s fees and argued that they were “prevailing parties” because the court had ordered DMV to reintroduce their licenses. The US appeal for the 4th circuit agreed with them.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned the 4th Circuit’s decision.
Roberts explained that when Congress adopted the fee displacement provision, whether a plaintiff was a “prevailing party” was not “dependent on the degree of success in various phases in the” trial, but instead of “about, at the end of the suit, “Has the applicant succeeded.
But winning a preliminary injunction, which the one issued by the court in this case, justified Roberts, cannot make a plaintiff a prevailing party, because in such a scenario, the applicant has only achieved temporary success at a dissemination stage in the “trial.
In fact, noticing Roberts, it is not uncommon for courts to issue a preliminary injunction, only to achieve a different result after it is considering the benefits of the case more completely. And the fact that events outside the case leave the dispute, emphasized Roberts, cannot “convert a temporary order” as a preliminary order which is “designed to preserve the parties’ status” for “a final assessment of their rights” it can do a plaintiff for a “prevailing party” for a fee price.
To maintain that the drivers in this case are not “prevailing parties” are also in accordance with the court’s previous cases involving attorneys’ fee prices in civil rights cases. In 2001, Roberts noted the court rejected the idea that a plaintiff may receive a lawyer when a defendant voluntarily changes his behavior in response to the trial. He explained this case, made it clear that the change in the legal relationship between the applicant and the defendant must “legally be sanctioned.”
And six years later, the Court found that a plaintiff who received a preliminary order, but not a permanent, was not a “prevailing party” because the change in the legal matters was not “persistent.”
“Today,” Roberts wrote, “We find that the lasting nature of this change in itself must be sanctioned legally. A plaintiff who wins a short -term victory on a preliminary injunction is not becoming a ‘prevailing party’, simply because external events convert the short -term victory into a lasting. Rather, “he concluded,” a plaintiff reigns “according to the statute when a court finally resolves a claim that materially changes the legal relationship between the parties.”
By creating a “straightforward, light-line rule,” Roberts added, Tuesday’s decision also reduces the likelihood that civil rights cases will be followed by “another major trial” seeking attorney’s fees. Roberts pushed back against the driver’s proposal that the rule will lead the government after a preliminary injunction has been made against it to take steps to knock out the case so that it can avoid the risk of having to pay lawyers. Roberts rejected the drivers’ concerns as simply speculation and probably not arise.
In his dissent, Jackson questioned the majority’s claim that Tuesday’s decision “naturally follows from the” court’s previous decisions. She emphasized that of the 11 federal appeals courts that have considered the question, “All of them agree that at least some Preliminary injunctions trigger eligibility ”under the federal law.
In Jackson’s opinion, the majority’s conclusion that a plaintiff who obtains a preliminary injunction never recover attorney’s fees “lacks any basis” in the text of the law. Furthermore, she warned, it is “clearly incompatible with the clear goal of the statutory destination, which is to encourage lawyers to submit civil rights actions on behalf of the most vulnerable people in our society.”
This article was originally published on Howe on the field.
