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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
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No. 91-990
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DALE FARRAR and PAT SMITH, co-administrators
of estate of JOSEPH D. FARRAR, deceased, PETI-
TIONERS v. WILLIAM P. HOBBY, JR.
on writ of certiorari to the united states court
of appeals for the fifth circuit
[December 14, 1992]

  Justice O'Connor, concurring.
  If ever there was a plaintiff who deserved no attorney's
fees at all, that plaintiff is Joseph Farrar.  He filed a
lawsuit demanding 17 million dollars from six defendants.
After 10 years of litigation and two trips to the Court of
Appeals, he got one dollar from one defendant.  As the
Court holds today, that is simply not the type of victory
that merits an award of attorney's fees.  Accordingly, I
join the Court's opinion and concur in its judgment.  I
write separately only to explain more fully why, in my
view, it is appropriate to deny fees in this case.

                            I
  Congress has authorized the federal courts to award -a
reasonable attorney's fee- in certain civil rights cases, but
only to -the prevailing party.-  42 U. S. C. 1988; Texas
State Teachers Assn. v. Garland Independent School Dist.,
489 U. S. 782, 789 (1989).  To become a prevailing party,
a plaintiff must obtain, at an absolute minimum, -actual
relief on the merits of [the] claim,- ante, at 8, which
-affects the behavior of the defendant towards the plain-
tiff,- Hewitt v. Helms, 482 U. S. 755, 761 (1987) (emphasis
omitted); accord, ante, at 8 (relief obtained must -alte[r]
the legal relationship between the parties- and -modif[y]
the defendant's behavior in a way that directly benefits
the plaintiff-).  Joseph Farrar met that minimum condi-
tion for prevailing party status.  Through this lawsuit, he
obtained an enforceable judgment for one dollar in nomi-
nal damages.  One dollar is not exactly a bonanza, but it
constitutes relief on the merits.  And it affects the
defendant's behavior toward the plaintiff, if only by forcing
him to pay one dollar-something he would not otherwise
have done.  Ante, at 9.
  Nonetheless, Garland explicitly states that an enforce-
able judgment alone is not always enough: -Beyond th[e]
absolute limitation [of some relief on the merits], a
technical victory may be so insignificant . . . as to be
insufficient- to support an award of attorney's fees.  489
U. S., at 792.  While Garland may be read as indicating
that this de minimis or technical victory exclusion is a
second barrier to prevailing party status, the Court makes
clear today that, in fact, it is part of the determination
of what constitutes a reasonable fee.  Compare ibid.
(purely technical or de minimis victories are -insufficient
to support prevailing party status-) with ante, at 10 (the
-technical- nature of the victory -does not affect the
prevailing party inquiry- but instead -bear[s] on the
propriety of fees awarded under 1988-).  And even if the
exclusion's location is debatable, its effect is not: When
the plaintiff's success is purely technical or de minimis,
no fees can be awarded.  Such a plaintiff either has failed
to achieve victory at all, or has obtained only a pyrrhic
victory for which the reasonable fee is zero.  The Court's
opinion today and its unanimous opinion in Garland are
thus in accord.  See ante, at 11 (merely -forma[l]- victory
can yield -no attorney's fees at all-); Garland, supra, at
792 (-Where the plaintiff's success on a legal claim can be
characterized as purely technical or de minimis, a district
court would be justified in concluding that- denial of
attorney's fees is appropriate).
  Consequently, the Court properly holds that, when a
plaintiff's victory is purely technical or de minimis, a
district court need not go through the usual complexities
involved in calculating attorney's fees.  Ante, at 11 (court
need not calculate presumptive fee by determining the
number of hours reasonably expended and multiplying it
by the reasonable hourly rate; nor must it apply the 12
factors bearing on reasonableness).  As a matter of
common sense and sound judicial administration, it would
be wasteful indeed to require that courts laboriously and
mechanically go through those steps when the de minimis
nature of the victory makes the proper fee immediately
obvious.  Instead, it is enough for a court to explain why
the victory is de minimis and announce a sensible decision
to -award low fees or no fees- at all.  Ibid.
  Precedent confirms what common sense suggests.  It
goes without saying that, if the de minimis exclusion were
to prevent the plaintiff from obtaining prevailing party
status, fees would have to be denied.  Supra, at 1.  And
if the de minimis victory exclusion is in fact part of the
reasonableness inquiry, see ante, at 10, summary denial
of fees is still appropriate.  We have explained that even
the prevailing plaintiff may be denied fees if -`special
circumstances would render [the] award unjust.'-  Hensley
v. Eckerhart, 461 U. S. 424, 429 (1983) (citations omitted).
While that exception to fee awards has often been articu-
lated separately from the reasonableness inquiry, some-
times it is bound up with reasonableness: It serves as a
short-hand way of saying that, even before calculating a
lodestar or wading through all the reasonableness factors,
it is clear that the reasonable fee is no fee at all.  After
all, where the only reasonable fee is no fee, an award of
fees would be unjust; conversely, where a fee award would
be unjust, the reasonable fee is no fee at all.
  Of course, no matter how much sense this approach
makes, it would be wholly inappropriate to adopt it if
Congress had declared a contrary intent.  When constru-
ing a statute, this Court is bound by the choices Congress
has made, not the choices we might wish it had made.
Felicitously, here they are one and the same.  Section
1988 was enacted for a specific purpose: to restore the
former equitable practice of awarding attorney's fees to
the prevailing party in certain civil rights cases, a practice
this Court had disapproved in Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.
v. Wilderness Society, 421 U. S. 240 (1975).  Hensley,
supra, at 429; see S. Rep. No. 94-1011, p. 6 (1976) (-This
bill creates no startling new remedy-it only meets the
technical requirements that the Supreme Court has laid
down if the Federal courts are to continue the practice of
awarding attorneys' fees which had been going on for
years prior to the Court's [Alyeska] decision-).  That
practice included the denial of fees to plaintiffs who,
although technically prevailing parties, had achieved only
de minimis success.  See, e.g., Tatum v. Morton, 386 F.
Supp. 1308, 1317-1319 (DC 1974) (fees denied where
plaintiffs recovered $100 each); see also Mills v. Electric
Auto-Lite Co., 396 U. S. 375, 392, 396 (1970) (under judge-
made fee-shifting rule for shareholder actions that benefit
the corporation, no fees are available if the only benefit
achieved is merely -`technical in its consequence'- (quoting
Bosch v. Meeker Cooperative Light & Power Assn., 257
Minn. 362, 366, 367, 101 N. W. 2d 423, 426, 427 (1960)));
cf. Ruckelshaus v. Sierra Club, 463 U. S. 680, 688, n. 9
(1983) (-[W]e do not mean to suggest that trival success
on the merits, or purely procedural victories, would justify
an award of fees under statutes setting out the `when
appropriate' standard-).  And although Congress did not
intend to restore every detail of pre-Alyeska practice, see
West Virginia Univ. Hospitals, Inc. v. Casey, 499 U. S.
___, ___ (1991), the practice of denying fees to pyrrhic
victors is one it clearly intended to preserve.  Section 1988
expressly grants district courts discretion to withhold
attorney's fees from prevailing parties in appropriate
circumstances: It states that a court -may- award fees -in
its discretion.-  42 U. S. C. 1988.  As under pre-Alyeska
practice, the occurrence of a purely technical or de mini-
mis victory is such a circumstance.  Chimerical accom-
plishments are simply not the kind of legal change that
Congress sought to promote in the fee statute.
  Indeed, 1988 contemplates the denial of fees to de
minimis victors through yet another mechanism.  The
statute only authorizes courts to award fees -as part of
the costs.-  42 U. S. C. 1988.  As a result, when a court
denies costs, it must deny fees as well; if there are no
costs, there is nothing for the fees to be awarded -as part
of.-  And when Congress enacted 1988, the courts would
deny even a prevailing party costs under Federal Rule of
Civil Procedure 54(d) where the victory was purely techni-
cal.  Lewis v. Pennington, 400 F. 2d 806, 819 (CA6)
(-`prevailing party is prima facie entitled to costs'- unless
-`the judgment recovered was insignificant in comparison
to the amount actually sought and actually amounted to
a victory for the defendant'- (quoting Lichter Foundation,
Inc. v. Welch, 269 F. 2d 142, 146 (CA6 1959))), cert.
denied, 393 U. S. 983 (1968); Esso Standard (Libya), Inc.
v. SS Wisconsin, 54 F. R. D. 26, 27 (SD Tex. 1971)
(-Circumstances justifying denial of costs to the prevailing
party [exist] where the judgment recovered was insignifi-
cant in comparison to the amount actually sought-); see
also Brown v. GSA, 425 U. S. 820, 828 (1976) (inquiry is
Congress' understanding of the law, correct or not).  Just
as a pyrrhic victor would be denied costs under Rule
54(d), so too should it be denied fees under 1988.

                           II
  In the context of this litigation, the technical or de
minimis nature of Joseph Farrar's victory is readily
apparent: He asked for a bundle and got a pittance.
While we hold today that this pittance is enough to
render him a prevailing party, ante, at 9-10, it does not
by itself prevent his victory from being purely technical.
It is true that Joseph Farrar recovered something.  But
holding that any award of nominal damages renders the
victory material would -render the concept of de minimis
relief meaningless.  Every nominal damage award has as
its basis a finding of liability, but obviously many such
victories are [p]yrrhic ones.-  Lawrence v. Hinton, 20 Fed.
R. Serv. 3d 934, 937 (CA4 1991); accord, Commissioners
Court of Medina County v. United States, 221 U. S. App.
D. C. 116, 123-124, 683 F. 2d 435, 442-443 (1982) (where
-the net result achieved is so far from the position origi-
nally propounded . . . it would be stretching the imagina-
tion to consider the result a `victory' in the sense of
vindicating the rights of the fee claimants-).  That is not
to say that all nominal damages awards are de minimis.
Nominal relief does not necessarily a nominal victory
make.  See ante, at 11.  But, as in pre-Alyeska and Rule
54(d) practice, see supra, at 5-6, a substantial difference
between the judgment recovered and the recovery sought
suggests that the victory is in fact purely technical.  See
ante, at 11 (-A plaintiff who seeks compensatory damages
but receives no more than nominal damages- may -formal-
ly `prevai[l]' under 1988- but will -often- receive no fees
at all).  Here that suggestion is quite strong.  Joseph
Farrar asked for 17 million dollars; he got one.  It is hard
to envision a more dramatic difference.
  The difference between the amount recovered and the
damages sought is not the only consideration, however.
Carey v. Piphus, 435 U. S. 247, 254 (1978), makes clear
that an award of nominal damages can represent a victory
in the sense of vindicating rights even though no actual
damages are proved.  Ante, at 8.  Accordingly, the courts
also must look to other factors.  One is the significance
of the legal issue on which the plaintiff claims to have
prevailed.  Garland, 489 U. S., at 792.  Petitioners
correctly point out that Joseph Farrar in a sense succeed-
ed on a significant issue-liability.  But even on that
issue he cannot be said to have achieved a true victory.
Respondent was just one of six defendants and the only
one not found to have engaged in a conspiracy.  If recov-
ering one dollar from the least culpable defendant and
nothing from the rest legitimately can be labeled a
victory-and I doubt that it can-surely it is a hollow one.
Joseph Farrar may have won a point, but the game, set,
and match all went to the defendants.
  Given that Joseph Farrar got some of what he want-
ed-one seventeen millionth, to be precise-his success
might be considered material if it also accomplished some
public goal other than occupying the time and energy of
counsel, court, and client.  Section 1988 is not -a relief
Act for lawyers.-  Riverside v. Rivera, 477 U. S. 561, 588
(1986) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).  Instead, it is a tool
that ensures the vindication of important rights, even
when large sums of money are not at stake, by making
attorney's fees available under a private attorney general
theory.  Yet one searches these facts in vain for the public
purpose this litigation might have served.  The District
Court speculated that the judgment, if accompanied by a
large fee award, might deter future lawless conduct, see
App. to Pet. for Cert. A23-A24, but did not identify the
kind of lawless conduct that might be prevented.  Nor is
the conduct to be deterred apparent from the verdict,
which even petitioners acknowledge is -regrettably obtuse.-
Tr. of Oral Arg. 16.  Such a judgment cannot deter
misconduct any more than a bolt of lightning can; its
results might be devastating, but it teaches no valuable
lesson because it carries no discernable meaning.  Cf.
Chicano Police Officer's Assn. v. Stover, 624 F. 2d 127, 131
(CA10 1980) (nuisance settlement that does not promote
any public purpose cannot support award of attorney's
fees), cited and quoted in Garland, supra, at 792.
                           III
  In this case, the relevant indicia of success-the extent
of relief, the significance of the legal issue on which the
plaintiff prevailed, and the public purpose served-all
point to a single conclusion: Joseph Farrar achieved only
a de minimis victory.  As the Court correctly holds today,
the appropriate fee in such a case is no fee at all.
Because the Court of Appeals gave Joseph Farrar every-
thing he deserved-nothing-I join the Court's opinion
affirming the judgment below.