118
O'Connor, J., concurring
judicial administration, it would be wasteful indeed to require that courts laboriously and mechanically go through those steps when the de minimis nature of the victory makes the proper fee immediately obvious. Instead, it is enough for a court to explain why the victory is de minimis and announce a sensible decision to "award low fees or no fees" at all. Ante, at 115.
Precedent confirms what common sense suggests. It goes without saying that, if the de minimis exclusion were to prevent the plaintiff from obtaining prevailing party status, fees would have to be denied. Supra, at 116. And if the de mini-mis victory exclusion is in fact part of the reasonableness inquiry, see ante, at 114, summary denial of fees is still appropriate. We have explained that even the prevailing plaintiff may be denied fees if " 'special circumstances would render [the] award unjust.' " Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U. S. 424, 429 (1983) (citations omitted). While that exception to fee awards has often been articulated separately from the reasonableness inquiry, sometimes it is bound up with reasonableness: It serves as a short-hand way of saying that, even before calculating a lodestar or wading through all the reasonableness factors, it is clear that the reasonable fee is no fee at all. After all, where the only reasonable fee is no fee, an award of fees would be unjust; conversely, where a fee award would be unjust, the reasonable fee is no fee at all.
Of course, no matter how much sense this approach makes, it would be wholly inappropriate to adopt it if Congress had declared a contrary intent. When construing a statute, this Court is bound by the choices Congress has made, not the choices we might wish it had made. Felicitously, here they are one and the same. Section 1988 was enacted for a specific purpose: to restore the former equitable practice of awarding attorney's fees to the prevailing party in certain civil rights cases, a practice this Court had disapproved in Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. v. Wilderness Society, 421 U. S. 240 (1975). Hensley, supra, at 429; see S. Rep. No. 94-1011,
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