Grounds for Relief

Rule 59(e) says when to file and says nothing about when to win. It requires that a motion to alter or amend a judgment be filed no later than 28 days after entry of the judgment, and it names no reason that justifies a change.¹ A student who reads only the rule therefore cannot answer the question an exam will ask: on what showing may a judge undo a judgment she has just entered? The answer comes from how courts describe the motion. It asks the court to correct a substantive error in the judgment, such as a manifest error of law or fact, and it is usually directed to an intervening change in the law or to newly discovered evidence that was not available at trial.²

The list of recognized grounds is short because a judgment exists to end a dispute. A judge who could rework a judgment for any reason a loser could put into words would face a second round of briefing after every adverse ruling, and no judgment would settle anything. The recognized grounds mark the cases in which leaving the judgment alone costs more than reopening it: the court made a plain mistake, evidence existed that the court could not have seen, or the governing law changed after the court ruled. Each describes something the court got wrong, could not see, or could not have anticipated. A motion that only repeats the losing argument describes none of these, and it fails for that reason.

The next three subsections take the grounds in turn, starting with manifest error. A fourth subsection turns to a recurring variation: the plaintiff whose complaint was dismissed and who wants to replead after judgment.

Manifest Error of Law or Fact

Manifest error is the first recognized ground, and courts describe it in the same words they use for the motion itself: a request that the court correct a substantive error in the judgment, such as a manifest error of law or fact.³ Manifest means plain, an error that shows itself without a long argument. An error of law occurs when the court applies the wrong rule or overlooks a rule that governs the case. One court of appeals, for example, faulted a district court that dismissed a case for misconduct without first considering the likely merits of the claims, a consideration that circuit precedent required before such a dismissal.⁴ An error of fact occurs when the court misreads the record or rests a finding on something the record does not contain. Either way, the motion targets the court's own decision, and its claim is that the decision contains a mistake the judge made.

The word manifest does the screening. A losing party almost always believes the ruling was wrong, because the judge has already read the briefs and chosen the other side. If that belief sufficed, every adverse judgment would draw a second round of briefing on the same arguments, which adds delay and no accuracy. Limiting the motion to plain mistakes keeps it useful for the case it exists to serve, in which the same judge can fix an obvious slip in an afternoon instead of sending the parties to the court of appeals.

A court has described a Rule 59(e) motion as a ‘one-time effort to bring alleged errors in a just-issued decision to a habeas court’s attention’ and as ‘a limited continuation of the original proceeding.’⁵ The description comes from habeas, but it captures what the motion is in any case: one chance to have the judge who just ruled look again at something she got wrong. A movant who spends that chance repeating an argument the court has already heard gains nothing. The court also measures the claimed mistake against what it had before it when it ruled, so a fact the court never saw is not a mistake the court made. A movant who relies on such a fact invokes a different ground, which the next subsection takes up.

Students often treat a forcefully worded disagreement as manifest error. The repealed-statute movant gave the judge something to verify, a controlling source the ruling failed to account for. The landlord gave the judge only the argument the opinion had already answered. The first scene also depends on timing. Had Congress repealed the statute after the court entered judgment, the court would not have erred when it ruled, and the movant would be relying on a change in the law, the third ground.

Manifest error also differs from a clerical mistake. A clerical mistake makes the judgment incorrectly reflect what the court intended, and the proper vehicle for it is the relief-from-judgment rule, because a Rule 59(e) motion is not ordinarily used to correct such errors.⁶ The dividing question is whether the judgment says what the court meant. If it does and the court was wrong about the law or the record, the motion belongs under Rule 59(e). If it does not, the court's decision was sound and the paper misstates it. A later section compares the two rules in full.

Exam Analysis Steps

The ground turns on what the motion actually identifies, not on how strongly the movant feels about the ruling, so run it as a short series of questions in order:

Ask whether the movant claims the court's decision was wrong or only that the written judgment misstates what the court decided. Only the first claim belongs to Rule 59(e).
Identify the specific legal premise or factual finding that the movant says is mistaken.
Check whether the mistake is visible in the ruling and the record as they stood when the judgment was entered. That check excludes mistakes that depend on later events or on evidence the court never saw.
Ask whether the motion offers anything beyond the arguments the court already rejected.
Confirm that the motion was filed no later than 28 days after entry of the judgment.

Newly Discovered Evidence

Newly discovered evidence is proof that bears on the result but was not available when the court decided the case, and the movant's claim is that the judgment rests on an incomplete record.⁸ That claim blames something different from what manifest error blames. A manifest-error movant says the court misjudged the record it had. This movant says the court never had something that matters.

The requirement that the evidence have been unavailable before judgment follows from what would happen without it. If any evidence offered after judgment could reopen a case, a party holding a useful document or witness would have every reason to keep it back, watch how the court ruled, and produce it only after losing. The motion would become a free second trial for the party who gambled and lost. Insisting that the evidence be genuinely unavailable earlier pushes each side to put in all of its proof before judgment, and it keeps the ground open for the case it exists to serve: a judgment reached on a record that was incomplete through no fault of the movant. The relief-from-judgment rule states the same idea outright, because it reaches newly discovered evidence that could not have been discovered through diligence in time for a motion for new trial.⁹

The plaintiffs in re SuperValu, Inc. sued after data breaches. The district court dismissed the complaint without prejudice for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, concluding that none of the plaintiffs had alleged an injury in fact, because the allegations did not plausibly suggest that the plaintiffs were likely to suffer future identity theft.¹⁰ The plaintiffs then filed a Rule 59(e) motion and attached three affidavits. They later drew on those same affidavits for allegations about the likelihood of identity theft following a data breach, so the affidavits plainly addressed the point on which the complaint had failed.¹¹ The district court nevertheless denied the motion for failing to meet the standard for newly discovered evidence.¹²

The case supports two points. First, relevance to the result is only part of the showing. A movant who attaches new affidavits after losing must still satisfy the newly discovered evidence standard, and a court that finds the standard unmet may deny the motion. Second, the case has limits. The appellate opinion reports the district court's conclusion and says nothing about its reasoning, and the plaintiffs did not appeal the denial of the Rule 59(e) motion.¹³ SuperValu therefore shows that the ground has a standard and that a motion can fail it. It does not show which feature of the affidavits fell short.

Hypothetical Illustration

A plaintiff loses on summary judgment in a product case. Eleven days after judgment, the plaintiff learns that the manufacturer withheld an internal safety memo during discovery. The plaintiff had no way to find the memo earlier, and it bears directly on the claim the court rejected. The motion, filed within the 28 days, rests on evidence that was unavailable before judgment and that goes to the merits, so it fits the ground.

Another plaintiff loses on summary judgment in a contract case and files a Rule 59(e) motion attaching a signed amendment to the contract. The amendment has sat in the plaintiff's own files since before the suit began, and the plaintiff left it out of the summary judgment papers. The evidence was available all along, so its omission was the plaintiff's choice, and the ground does not rescue a party from its own presentation.

Students often treat evidence that is new to the court as evidence that is newly discovered. Anything a movant attaches for the first time after judgment is new to the court's record. The ground requires more: the evidence must have been unavailable before judgment. The concealed memo meets that test and the contract amendment does not. A movant who clears that hurdle must still file within 28 days of entry of the judgment and, as SuperValu shows, must still meet the governing standard once the evidence is attached.

Intervening Change in Law

An intervening change in the law is a change in the governing rule that occurs after the court has entered judgment, such as a controlling decision that overrules the one the court applied.¹⁵ The word intervening carries the timing requirement. The change must come after the judgment, so that the judgment rests on a rule that no longer describes the law the court would apply today.

This ground differs from manifest error in what it blames. A manifest-error movant says the judge misjudged the law or the record as they stood when she ruled. A movant relying on a change in the law makes no such claim, because the court applied the law correctly and the law moved afterward. The motion still has a purpose. During the 28-day window the case remains before the trial court, and the judgment has not yet hardened into something others rely on. A judgment already out of date can be corrected then at little cost, whereas leaving it in place invites an appeal over a rule that has since changed.

Requiring that the change come after the judgment keeps the ground narrow, and the reason lies in what the movant could have done. A party who knew of a controlling rule before judgment could have cited it. If law that already existed could be raised under this ground, a losing party could save its best authority for a second round of briefing, and the screening that manifest error imposes would mean nothing. When the rule did not exist until after judgment, nobody could have put it before the court, so the movant has not gambled and lost. The change also does not extend the deadline. The 28 days run from entry of the judgment, so a change that arrives after that period closes cannot be raised through this motion.¹⁶ A later section sets the deadline beside the relief available under Rule 60.

Hypothetical Illustration

A district court enters judgment for a defendant on June 2, applying a circuit rule that treats a particular form of notice as sufficient. On June 9 the circuit, sitting en banc, overrules that rule and holds the notice insufficient. The plaintiff moves to alter the judgment on June 20. The governing law changed after the court ruled, and the motion falls within the 28 days, so the ground applies.

In a different case, a circuit decision issued in April holds the same notice insufficient. Neither party cites it. The district court rules in May under the older view and enters judgment on June 2, and the plaintiff's motion relies on the April decision. That decision predates the judgment, so the law did not change after the court ruled. The motion identifies authority the court could have been given and was not, and the intervening-change ground does not fit.

Students often treat any authority the court did not see as a change in the law. The question is the date of the authority relative to entry of judgment, and what the court knew does not matter. In the second scene the movant's real complaint is that the court overlooked a controlling decision. The motion must be framed, if it can be framed at all, as manifest error, and the movant carries the burden of showing that plain mistake. In the first scene nothing was overlooked, and the movant's showing consists entirely of the later change.

Amending the Complaint After Judgment

A plaintiff whose complaint has been dismissed often wants to use Rule 59(e)'s 28-day window for a different purpose: to replead.¹⁸ Before judgment, courts apply more lenient standards to a request for leave to amend under Rule 15(a)(2). After judgment, the rule changes. District courts may not ignore the considerations of Rule 15, but leave to amend will be granted only if it is consistent with the stringent standards governing relief under Rule 59(e) and Rule 60(b).¹⁹ To revive claims the judgment has ended, the court must first set the judgment aside under Rule 59 or Rule 60, and only then can amendment be permitted under Rule 15(a)(2).²⁰

The sequence makes sense once one asks what the alternative would allow. If a plaintiff could skip that first step and ask for leave to amend under Rule 15 alone, any postjudgment attack could be recast as a request to amend, and the 28-day deadline and the recognized grounds would bind no one. Requiring the judgment to be set aside first keeps those limits in force, while Rule 15 still matters as the second step.

SuperValu shows the sequence in action. After the district court dismissed the complaint without prejudice for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction,²¹ the plaintiffs filed a Rule 59(e) motion and a motion for leave to amend, but they attached no proposed amended complaint. The district court denied the Rule 59(e) motion for failing the newly discovered evidence standard, and it denied the request to amend because the court's local rules required a proposed amended complaint.²² A week later the plaintiffs filed a second motion for leave to amend, this time with a proposed amended complaint. It added general allegations about the likelihood of identity theft after a data breach, many of them based on the same three affidavits that had failed to win relief under Rule 59(e).²³ The plaintiffs appealed the dismissal but not the denial of their Rule 59(e) motion.²⁴

The motion before the court of appeals was filed on November 7, 2017, a year and ten months after the original judgment, which put it well outside the 28-day limit of Rule 59(e).²⁵ The proposed amendments related only to the claims of the previously dismissed plaintiffs and contained no new allegations specific to a plaintiff named Holmes. The court of appeals therefore treated the motion as a postjudgment motion and reviewed its denial for abuse of discretion.²⁶ The original dismissal was without prejudice, yet the postjudgment framework governed. That label tells a court whether the dismissed claims may be brought again, but it did not keep the dismissed case open for repleading under the more lenient Rule 15 standard. The district court, for its part, had declined to decide how the motion should be classified, because futility and undue delay counseled against leave to amend even under the more lenient standards that apply before judgment.²⁷

Hypothetical Illustration

A plaintiff's complaint faces a pending motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Before the court rules, the plaintiff asks for leave to file an amended complaint that supplies the missing facts. No judgment exists, so Rule 15(a)(2) governs and its more lenient standard applies.

A second plaintiff in the same position says nothing, loses on the motion to dismiss, sees final judgment entered, and files the identical proposed amended complaint 40 days later. The 28 days of Rule 59(e) have run, so that rule offers no route, and amendment becomes possible only if the plaintiff first satisfies Rule 60(b) and the judgment is set aside. The proposed pleading is the same in both scenes. The second request faces the stringent test and the first faces the lenient one, because a judgment now stands between the plaintiff and the complaint.

A plaintiff who files within the 28 days keeps Rule 59(e) available, but the rule's own grounds must still be met. The SuperValu plaintiffs' first motion shows the point: it was timely enough to be considered and still failed the newly discovered evidence standard. A timely filing preserves the route without lowering the showing required to travel it.

Exam Analysis Steps

The governing standard depends on a classification made before any argument about the amendment itself, so run the analysis in a fixed order:

Ask whether the court has entered a judgment that ends the claims the movant wants to amend. If so, the request is postjudgment, even if the dismissal was without prejudice.
Treat the request for leave to amend as a postjudgment motion, so that Rule 15(a)(2) cannot operate until the judgment is set aside under Rule 59 or Rule 60.
Measure the filing date against the 28 days of Rule 59(e). If that period has closed, ask whether Rule 60(b) supplies a ground, remembering that its grounds differ from those of Rule 59(e).
Ask whether the movant can meet the stringent standard of whichever rule remains open, such as manifest error, newly discovered evidence, or an intervening change in the law. A wish to replead is not itself a ground for relief.
Only if the judgment is set aside, apply the considerations of Rule 15(a)(2) to decide whether the amendment itself should be allowed.