Lackey v. Stinnie

Majority — Roberts

Joined by: Thomas, Alito, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett

The majority held that the phrase "prevailing party" in §1988(b) is a legal term of art that, at the time of the statute's enactment, meant the party who successfully maintained their claim when the matter was finally resolved. The Court reasoned that preliminary injunctions do not conclusively decide a case on the merits — they only assess whether a plaintiff is likely to succeed, along with factors like irreparable harm and the balance of equities — and are designed merely to preserve the parties' positions until a full trial can occur. Building on two prior decisions, Buckhannon (which required that any change in the parties' legal relationship be "judicially sanctioned") and Sole v. Wyner (which required that the change be "enduring"), the Court added a third requirement: the enduring nature of the change must itself result from a judicial order, not from outside events like a legislature repealing a law. The majority also argued that a clear, easy-to-apply rule serves judicial economy by reducing costly fee disputes, and noted that Congress — not the courts — is the proper body to expand fee eligibility if it chooses, pointing to other statutes where Congress has already done exactly that.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent argued that nothing in the text of §1988(b) requires a plaintiff to obtain a conclusive final judgment in order to qualify as a "prevailing party," and that the majority invented this requirement by misreading the dictionary definitions it relied upon. Justice Jackson wrote that the relevant legal dictionaries simply ask whether a party successfully maintained their claim "at the end of the suit" — and a suit can end in many ways, including through mootness, without a final merits ruling. The dissent contended that the Court's own prior cases support fee eligibility for at least some preliminary injunctions, because those cases define "prevailing" as obtaining actual relief on the merits that materially alters the legal relationship between the parties — a standard that an unreversed preliminary injunction can satisfy. The dissent also argued that the majority's rule will produce harmful real-world consequences: it incentivizes government defendants to strategically moot cases after losing at the preliminary injunction stage to avoid fee liability, and it discourages attorneys from taking on civil rights cases where interim relief is critical, undermining Congress's clear intent to expand access to justice for people with civil rights grievances. The dissent pointed to the facts of this very case — where the Commissioner explicitly lobbied to repeal the law in part to avoid ongoing legal fees — as evidence that strategic mooting is not merely speculative.