Foster v. Dula
- Colleen McMahon
- 1:21-cv-11224
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Foster v. Dula, Judge McMahon awarded plaintiffs’ counsel $25,000 in fees after rejecting defendants’ argument that counsel’s appeal was frivolous.
Plaintiffs’ counsel, Mr. Lucas, received a $25,000 attorneys’ fee award; the ruling also resolved defendants’ objection to that award and directed the clerk to enter judgment and close the file.
What happened
In Foster v. Dula, defendants argued that plaintiffs’ counsel, Mr. Lucas, should receive no attorneys’ fees because he was pursuing an allegedly frivolous appeal about punitive damages under New York’s Human Rights Law.
Judge McMahon explained that a 2019 amendment appeared to allow punitive damages in employment-discrimination cases against private employers, although the law’s history was disputed because of later amendments. She said she was not deciding whether the law actually authorized those damages; she only considered the issue because defendants relied on it to oppose the fee award.
Judge McMahon concluded that Mr. Lucas had a good-faith basis for pursuing the issue and awarded the full $25,000 fee amount. She directed the clerk to enter judgment and close the file.
The detailed version
- Foster v. Dula · No. 1:21-cv-11224
- Colleen McMahon
- Jan. 19, 2024
Background
Cordia Foster and Cislyn Wright were the plaintiffs, and Elyse Dula, also known as Elyse Snow, and Ian K. Snow were the defendants. The addendum concerned attorneys’ fees for plaintiffs’ counsel, Mr. Lucas, following the court’s earlier decision on post-trial motions.
Defendants argued that Mr. Lucas should receive no attorneys’ fees because he was pursuing an appeal concerning the court’s decision not to instruct the jury on punitive damages. They characterized that appeal as frivolous because, in their view, punitive damages were unavailable for a private employment-discrimination action under the New York State Human Rights Law.
Punitive-damages issue
The court reviewed conflicting information about New York Executive Law § 297(9). Mr. Lucas cited an Eastern District of New York decision discussing a 2019 amendment that authorized punitive damages in employment-discrimination cases against private employers. Defendants’ counsel responded that the statute had been amended again in 2021 and that the 2019 language was absent from the 2021 version. Mr. Lucas disputed defendants’ account of the statutory history.
The court expressly declined to decide whether punitive damages are available in an employment-discrimination case against a private employer under the New York State Human Rights Law. It stated that the statutory question had been raised only to address defendants’ argument that Mr. Lucas’s fee award should be reduced or denied.
The court found that Mr. Lucas had a good-faith basis for asserting that punitive damages may be available under Executive Law § 297(9). The court also explained that its earlier decision not to give a punitive-damages instruction was based on its view that giving such an instruction was discretionary and on its assessment of the trial evidence—not on a conclusion that the statute barred punitive damages. The court noted that Mr. Lucas had not cited authority establishing that Second Circuit law required the instruction and that the jury had found neither severe or pervasive discriminatory conduct by Ms. Dula nor retaliation.
Ruling
Judge Colleen McMahon concluded that there was no reason to reduce the fee award below the $25,000 amount she had initially been prepared to authorize. She directed Mr. Lucas to prepare a judgment awarding that amount for entry by the clerk. The court stated that the pretrial motions were concluded, directed the clerk to enter judgment, and ordered that the file be closed.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.