Of course this assumes that the lawyer gets the amount awarded as "take home", which is probably far from the truth. In a big/tough civil rights case you are probably going to have firms litigating -- as opposed to just a single lawyer. Firm overhead is one reason lawyers cost so much, good secretaries, bookkeepers, and paralegals cost a lot of money (especially if you give 'em healthcare!). Then there is the office, etc. I'm not certain, in this case, how the court broke down "fees" versus "costs" or if it even did. Does the typical lodestar figure in expert fees? Academic research? Of course, on the converse a firm can certainly pad its hours to generate a higher return, which is easy to do if you're just looking at hours expended.

And it seems it also would have been interesting to question the Justice's seeming assumption of the traditional "billable hour" notion of compensation when that is under so much attack. Why pay lawers for how many hours they've logged and not for the 'quality' of their cases? It would have been interesting to hear the Justices answer "Just how much was Brown v. Board of Education worth?", or for someone to calculate how much the winning side paid in "Bush v. Gore".