Around a decade ago, Virginia trapped Damian Stinnie under insurmountable debt. Under state law, Damian’s driver’s license was automatically suspended when he couldn’t afford to pay a total of $1002 in court fines and fees he incurred as a result of a few traffic tickets. As a result, Damian was stuck in a vicious cycle: Without a license, he couldn’t hold down a job, and without a job, he couldn’t pay off the fines to get his license back.
A local nonprofit, the Legal Aid Justice Center, took up Damian’s case in 2016. Two years later, LAJC won a preliminary injunction reinstating his license and blocking enforcement of the debt suspension law, which a federal district court found likely violated the Constitution by depriving people of their licenses without giving them a hearing first. Two years after that, in response to LAJC’s continued advocacy, the Virginia legislature repealed the law outright, and the case was dismissed as moot. LAJC then petitioned for attorneys’ fees under the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Award Act, a federal statute more commonly known as Section 1988, which allows lawyers for the prevailing party in civil rights cases to be paid for their work.
LAJC got everything it went to court for: Damian’s license was reinstated, as were the licenses of thousands of other similarly-situated Virginians, and the law they challenged is now off the books. But on Tuesday, in Lackey v. Stinnie, a seven-justice Supreme Court majority decided that LAJC didn’t really prevail: Judges issue preliminary injunctions based in part on a prediction that the plaintiff will likely succeed on the merits, and the likelihood of success is not the same as actual success.
“A plaintiff who secures a preliminary injunction has achieved only temporary success at an intermediary stage of the suit,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority. “Because preliminary injunctions do not conclusively resolve the rights of parties on the merits, they do not confer prevailing party status.” Under the Court’s rule, instead of a paycheck, LAJC gets a pat on the back.
Congress enacted Section 1988 for people like Damian, who can’t afford to pay a lawyer’s hourly rate to vindicate their civil rights. Awarding fees under Section 1988 makes it feasible for lawyers to litigate meritorious claims no matter who brings them. The result in Stinnie declares that civil rights litigators can work on a case for years, achieve their goals, and still not get paid, which means that going forward, some unconstitutional laws won’t be challenged at all.
The Court began by looking up the definition of “prevailing party” in the top law dictionary in use at the time Congress enacted Section 1988, which explained that “prevailing” depends on success at the end of the suit, not at earlier stages. Quoting the dictionary, Roberts determined that a prevailing party is “the party ultimately prevailing when the matter is finally set at rest.”
Roberts then asserted that “rest” must specifically arise from a court’s decision on the merits, basically transforming a requirement that the case ends into a requirement about how the case ends. “A plaintiff who wins a transient victory on a preliminary injunction does not become a prevailing party simply because external events convert the transient victory into a lasting one,” said Roberts. “Rather, a plaintiff prevails under the statute when a court conclusively resolves a claim by granting enduring judicial relief on the merits.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, was flummoxed in dissent by her colleagues’ invention of a categorical bar on fee awards for plaintiffs who win preliminary relief. “It lacks any basis in the text,” said Jackson. “If Congress had meant for prevailing party status to hinge entirely on the conclusive nature of a judicial order, it could easily have said so.”
Jackson also argued that the Court’s interpretation of Section 1988 is “plainly inconsistent with that statutory provision’s clear objective.” Congress enacted the law to expand access to justice by encouraging attorneys to file civil rights actions on behalf of vulnerable people. But the holding in Stinnie limits access to justice by deterring attorneys from doing this work. “Without irony, the majority reads a statute that was enacted to ensure that private citizens have a meaningful opportunity to vindicate their civil rights as if Congress meant to make private civil rights enforcement harder to achieve,” Jackson wrote. The majority’s choice to “go out of its way” to frustrate Congress’s purpose, she continued, is “puzzling, to say the least.”
Finally, Jackson highlighted an additional perverse consequence of the Court’s decision: If a defendant starts “seeing the writing on the wall”—that is, if it seems clear that a court will rule that they violated the Constitution—they can strategically moot the case and avoid paying attorneys’ fees. “Precluding fee shifting in this scenario is manifestly inequitable, because it leaves respondents holding the bag for considerable litigation fees despite—and largely because of—their having succeeded in obtaining preliminary relief,” Jackson wrote.
Lackey v. Stinnie makes it riskier for attorneys to even try to protect the rights of low-income people, and will result in fewer people like Damian getting their day in court. The reason LAJC took Damian’s case in the first place is because the state was punishing him for being poor. Now the Supreme Court is doing the same thing.
