Western Watersheds Project v. United States Department of the Interior

The Government appeals from an award of attorneys’ fees to a plaintiff conservation group in a long-running dispute involving federal grazing permits in Idaho. Plaintiff-Appellee conservation group is Western Watersheds Project (‘WWP”) and the permits were issued by Defendant-Appellant U.S. Department of the Interior. The issue is whether the district court properly awarded fees to WWP for legal work done in the administrative proceedings conducted before the civil litigation in which the district court held that the Interior Board of Land Appeals (“IBLA”) had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in upholding the Government’s award of some of the grazing permits.

The precise legal issue concerns the interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Sullivan v. Hudson, 490 U.S. 877 , 109 S.Ct. 2248 , 104 L.Ed.2d 941 (1989), and whether it permits an award of fees under 28 U.S.C. § 2412 (d)(1)(A) to a prevailing party in district court for the work done in the administrative proceedings that preceded the district court action. Here, the district court awarded the fees because it concluded that the administrative proceedings were closely tied to its own resolution of the…