For civil rights lawyers, attorneys’ fees paid by the government play a critical role in funding work on behalf of indigent clients and in deterring unlawful conduct by government actors. While parties in our judicial system typically have no obligation to pay for their adversaries’ lawyers, various federal statutes obligate government defendants to pay attorneys’ fees to plaintiffs who win civil rights cases.

In April, however, the Supreme Court accepted for review a case that threatens to upend settled law across the federal circuits about plaintiffs’ entitlement to attorneys’ fees when they win a preliminary injunction that ultimately becomes moot through action by the defendants, a common scenario.