Cite as: 505 U. S. 557 (1992)
Blackmun, J., dissenting
and arbitrary" and would likely lead to "burdensome satellite litigation" that this Court has said should be avoided. Ante, at 566. The present case is an odd one in which to make this point: The issue of enhancement hardly occupied center stage in the fees portion of this litigation, and it became a time-consuming matter only after the Court granted certiorari, limited to this question alone.5 Moreover, if Justice O'Connor's standard were adopted, the matter of the amount by which fees should be increased would quickly become settled in the various district courts and courts of appeals for the different kinds of federal litigation. And in any event, speculation that enhancement determinations would be "burdensome" does not speak to the issue whether they are required by the fee-shifting statutes.
The final objection to be considered is the Court's contention that any approach that treats contingent-fee cases as a class is doomed to failure. The Court's argument on this score has two parts. First, the Court opines that "for a very large proportion of contingency-fee cases"—cases in which only equitable relief is sought—"there is no 'market treatment,' " except insofar as Congress has created an "artificial" market with the fee-shifting statutes themselves. It is circular, the Court contends, to "loo[k] to that 'market' for the meaning of fee-shifting." Ante, at 564. And even leaving that difficulty aside, the Court continues, the real "risk" to which lawyers respond is the riskiness of particular cases. Because under a class-based contingency enhancement system the same enhancement will be awarded whether the
5 It is fair to say that petitioner's attention was directed almost exclusively toward the merits issues, both in the lower courts and in its petition for certiorari. While petitioner sharply contested respondents' entitlement to an award and objected to the amount of the lodestar, its opposition to enhancement occupies only a single page of its memorandum in opposition to the motion for fees and costs. See App. 224-225. Only a little more than 1 page of the 30-page petition for certiorari is devoted to the issue of contingency enhancement. See Pet. for Cert. 25-27.
573
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