Xue Lu v. United States

The Ninth Circuit vacated the district court's award of attorneys' fees to plaintiff and remanded for further proceedings. The district court exercised its common law authority to award the fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), but the district court did not have the benefit of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Haeger, 137 S. Ct. 1178 (2017), when it issued the award. The panel held that it could not determine whether the district court's failure to apply the appropriate legal framework was harmless.On remand, the panel instructed that Goodyear's causation standard requires the district court to identify those expenses that plaintiffs would not have incurred but for the specific conduct that abused the judicial process, or to determine that the government's misconduct so permeated all or a portion of the suit that "all fees in the litigation, or a phase of it, meet the applicable test: They would not have been incurred except for the misconduct." View "Xue Lu v. United States" on Justia Law