Cite as: 535 U. S. 789 (2002)
Scalia, J., dissenting
ments within the statutory ceiling; instead, � 406(b) instructs courts to review for reasonableness fees yielded by those agreements. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Justice Scalia, dissenting.
I do not know what the judges of our district courts and courts of appeals are to make of today's opinion. I have no idea what the trial judge is to do if he finds the fee produced by the ("presumptively reasonable," ante, at 792) contingent-fee agreement to be 25% above the lodestar amount; or 40%; or 65%. Or what the appellate court is to do in an appeal from a district judge's reduction of the contingent fee to 300% of the lodestar amount; or 200%; or to the lodestar amount itself. While today's opinion gets this case out of our "in" box, it does nothing whatever to subject these fees to anything approximating a uniform rule of law. That is, I think, the inevitable consequence of trying to combine the incompatible. The Court tells the judge to commence his analysis with the contingent-fee agreement, but then to adjust the figure that agreement produces on the basis of factors (most notably, the actual time spent multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate, ante, at 808) that are, in a sense, the precise antithesis of the contingent-fee agreement, since it was the very purpose of that agreement to eliminate them from the fee calculation. In my view, the only possible way to give uniform meaning to the statute's "reasonable fee" provision is to understand it as referring to the fair value of the work actually performed, which we have held is best reflected by the lodestar.1 See Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U. S. 424, 433 (1983).
1 The Court finds it "unlikely," ante, at 806, that 42 U. S. C. � 406(b) (1994 ed.), enacted in 1965, contemplated application of the lodestar method that the courts had not yet even developed. Of course it did not. But it did
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