Goldring v. District of Columbia, 416 F.3d 70 (D.C. Cir. 2005)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that a prevailing party is not entitled to expert witness fees under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). After prevailing in an administrative hearing regarding the educational placement of their children, the parents of special education students sought to recoup fees and costs from the school district. When the school district only paid a portion of the expert fees, the parents filed suit in federal district court to recover the balance of the fees. The district court held that because IDEA does not provide "explicit statutory authority" permitting recovery of expert witness fees, the parents were bound by the limit of 28 U.S.C. § 1821(b). The D.C. Circuit Court in a two to one panel decision affirmed the lower court. The panel, relying on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Virginia University Hospitals, Inc. v. Casey, 499 U.S. 83 (1991), concluded that because "§ 1415 [of IDEA] and the version of § 1988 construed in Casey contain materially identical language and Casey held that § 1988’s language does not enable a prevailing party to shift his expert fees, we cannot but conclude that § 1415 does likewise." The panel also rejected the parents’ argument that the court should look to the legislative history to determine if Congress intended to permit recovery of expert witness fees under IDEA. Specifically, the parents pointed to "a single sentence in the House Conference Report on the Handicapped Children’s Protection Act (Conference Report), which amended the IDEA … that the term "attorney’s fees as part of the costs" include reasonable expenses and fees of expert witnesses and the reasonable costs of any test or evaluation which is found to be necessary for the preparation of the parent or guardian’s case in the action or proceeding, as well as traditional costs incurred in the course of litigating the case." While conceding that reference to legislative history may shed new light on congressional intent, even in those instances where the statutory language appears "superficially clear," the panel found the language in IDEA was not one of those instances of "superficially clear" language. Unlike the Second Circuit in Murphy v. Arlington Central School District, 402 F.3d 332 (2nd Cir. 2005), the panel concluded that "[a] sentence in a conference report cannot rewrite unambiguous statutory text, particularly text with a Supreme Court- tested and -approved meaning." It concluded that the holding in Casey prevents courts from expanding or contracting an unambiguous statutory phrase, i.e., one that has a "clearly accepted meaning in both legislative and judicial practice," based on the "statements of individual legislators or committees during the course of the enactment process." The panel also took issue with the Second Circuit’s reading of Casey in its Murphy decision. First, the D.C. Circuit panel was unpersuaded by the Second Circuit’s reliance on Justice Scalia’s footnote in Casey that referred to "the apparent effort by Congress to depart from the ordinary meaning of the term ‘costs’ in the IDEA." It noted that if the Supreme Court had found the one sentence of legislative history compelling, the Court "would have included §1415 in its catalogue of statutes authorizing a prevailing party to shift attorney’s fees as well as expert fees." Second, the panel rejected the Second Circuit’s reasoning that the fact the Congress saw no need to amend IDEA to specifically provide for recovery of expert fees demonstrated that the Supreme Court in Casey "recognized that, in enacting the IDEA, Congress sufficiently indicated in the Conference Committee Report that prevailing parties could recover expert fees under [IDEA]." Instead, the panel found that the fact that Congress amended § 1988 in light of Casey, but not §1415 creates the "more reasonable inference" that it had no intention of allowing recovery of expert fees under IDEA. Lastly, the panel found that the parents’ public policy argument for allowing recovery of expert fees under IDEA, i.e., denial of such fees places parents at a severe informational disadvantage vis-à-vis the school district, should be addressed to the legislative rather than judicial branch.