Case Citator › Richard S. Russell v. Louis W. Sullivan, M.D., Secretary of Health and Human Services

Richard S. Russell v. Louis W. Sullivan, M.D., Secretary of Health and Human Services

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Limited by some courts
Court
Ninth Circuit
Citation
930 F.2d 1443
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
98 of 98
Citing cases (total)
194
Treatment dates
2001
Limited by some courts
At least one reviewed court has limited this case’s holding to narrower facts or a narrower rule. No reviewed court has overruled it. Russell v. Sullivan is limited: all 98 flagged citations have been read, and the confirmed treatment is listed below. Sorenson v. Mink held that Russell's use of the current consumer price index for an EAJA cost-of-living adjustment was an unstated assumption on a non-litigated issue rather than a binding holding, and required use of the index for the year in which the fees were earned.
More on how this was screened

Every citing opinion positively applied one of Russell's unaffected holdings about Social Security fee awards or vocational-expert hypotheticals while reporting Sorenson's other-grounds treatment; none was itself a treating court.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

194 later cases cite Richard S. Russell v. Louis W. Sullivan, M.D., Secretary of Health and Human Services; 98 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

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Treatments

Limited

  • The Ninth Circuit held that Russell's current-CPI calculation was a nonprecedential assumption and required EAJA cost-of-living adjustments to use the CPI for the year in which the fees were earned.

    Sorenson v. Mink · Ninth Circuit · filed

    In three published opinions, this court used the most recent CPI-U to determine a cost-of-living increase under the EAJA. Russell v. Sullivan, 930 F.2d 1443, 1446 (9th Cir.1991); Animal Lovers Volunteer Ass’n v. Carlucci, 867 F.2d 1224, 1227 n. 2 (9th Cir.1989); Ramon-Sepulveda, 863 F.2d at 1463 n. 4. However, those opinions neither discussed the question of which CPI-U should be used nor considered the issue of sovereign immunity from prejudgment interest. Rather, they simply used the current CPI-U without explanation. “Such unstated assumptions on non-litigated issues are not precedential holdings binding future decisions.” Sakamoto v. Duty Free Shoppers, Ltd., 764 F.2d 1285, 1288 (9th Cir.1985); see also Estate of Magnin v. Commissioner, 184 F.3d 1074, 1077 (9th Cir.1999) (“When a case assumes a point without discussion, the case does not bind future panels.”). In sum, although the district court followed the “unstated assumptions” in our earlier eases, it made an error of law in adjusting Plaintiffs’ EAJA fees according to the current version of the CPI-U. On remand, the court should calculate the cost-of-living adjustment according to the CPI-U for the year in which the fees were earned.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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