No attorneys' fees despite so-ordered civil rights stipulation in plaintiff's favor

The limits of the fee-shifting statute in civil rights cases are on display here. Plaintiff got the relief he wanted in this disability discrimination claim against Stony Brook University, but he does not recover his attorneys' fees, which I am sure were sizeable.

The case is Sampson v. Stony Brook University, a summary order issued on March 4. Plaintiff was a medical student at Stony Brook. In separate litigation, he won a injunction against the outside testing agency, NBME, entitling him to testing accommodations. But that injunction was vacated on appeal because plaintiff's alleged inability to progress in medical school  depended in part on whether he could obtain an extension of his graduation date from Stony Brook. In the litigation against Stony Brook, the parties then stipulated that plaintiff would have until August 12, 2024 to complete his medical education. The stipulation was memorialized in a court order. Plaintiff eventually passed the medical exam, prompting the district court to dismiss the case as moot.

The Second Circuit (Lynch, Robinson and Nathan) holds that plaintiff will recover no attorneys' fees even though he got the relief he wanted. Why? Because the court-ordered stipulation did not have the requisite "judicial imprimatur" required under Supreme Court cases interpreting the fee-shifting statutes. First, as the Supreme Court just recently stated in Lackey v. Stinnie, 2025 WL 594737 (2025), "a plaintiff who successfully secures interim relief in the form of a preliminary injunction, and then ultimately achieves the desired result due to extrinsic factors that moot the case, may not be a prevailing party." The other central case on this issue is Buckhannon v, West Virginia, 532 U.S. 598 (2001), which holds that a case mooted out by defendant by giving the plaintiff the relief he requested does not render the plaintiff a prevailing party under the fee-shifting statutes.

While settlement agreements attained through a consent decree, a stipulation memorialized in a court order is not enough to turn this agreement into a consent decree enforceable by a court. The Second Circuit has already held that a so-ordered stipulation of dismissal is not the same as a judgment or consent decree. Since the so-ordered stipulation neither retained jurisdiction with the court to enforce the underlying settlement, and the stipulation was not incorporated into the order of dismissal, plaintiff cannot recover his attorneys' fees.