Rule 59(e) Versus New Trial: Changing the Judgment or Reopening the Trial

Rule 59(e) Versus New Trial: Changing the Judgment or Reopening the Trial

Rule 59 houses two post-judgment motions that ask for different remedies, and a court classifies a filing by the remedy it requests, whatever the caption says.¹ The first is the motion to alter or amend a judgment, which Rule 59(e) requires to be filed no later than 28 days after the entry of the judgment.² The second is the motion for a new trial under Rule 59(a), which lets the court grant a new trial on all or some of the issues, to any party, after a jury trial for any reason for which a new trial has traditionally been granted in an action at law in federal court.³

The difference lies in what each motion does to the trial. A new-trial motion reopens fact-finding: evidence is heard again, or a bench-trial record is reworked. A motion to alter or amend leaves the trial standing and works only on the judgment the trial produced.

Prejudgment interest shows the second kind at work. The Supreme Court held in Osterneck v. Ernst & Whinney that a postjudgment motion for discretionary prejudgment interest is a motion to alter or amend the judgment under Rule 59(e), reasoning in part that prejudgment interest is an element of the plaintiff's complete compensation.⁴ Trace the mechanism. Adding interest rewrites the sum the judgment orders the defendant to pay, yet everything the factfinder decided about what happened and what the plaintiff lost stays as it was, so nothing needs to be heard a second time. Wicks v. Conroy offers a state-court illustration of the same shape. There the trial court granted a motion to alter or amend under Maine's Rule 59(a) and entered an amended judgment that credited Conroy an additional $300 for improvements to the property, which changed the total credit to Wicks to $9,050.⁵ The decision applies a state rule, so it illustrates rather than controls, but the amendment it describes is a changed figure in the judgment and nothing larger.

A new-trial motion targets a different kind of defect. After a nonjury trial, the court may, on a motion for a new trial, open the judgment if one has been entered, take additional testimony, amend its findings of fact and conclusions of law or make new ones, and direct the entry of a new judgment.⁶ Those powers show the motion calling the court back into the evidence, and the two remedies fit two different defects. If the fact-finding was sound but a legal conclusion or the sum in the judgment is wrong, a retrial would discard good work to cure a problem that a correction solves. If the trouble lies in the trial itself, such as a verdict the evidence does not support, no change to the judgment can repair a conclusion that rests on a defective foundation, and only another round of fact-finding can.

The preservation rule points the same way. Absent exceptional circumstances, a party may not raise on appeal an error that it did not first ask the trial court to correct.⁷ A party who believes the evidence cannot support a verdict therefore has every reason to put that objection before the trial judge, and a motion for a new trial is the natural way to do it.

The two motions come out differently because of what each movant wants the court to do, and no caption would change the result. A filing described only as a Rule 59 motion has therefore not yet been classified. The question is whether the movant accepts the trial's findings and wants the judgment changed, or attacks the findings and wants them made again.

Both motions run on one clock. Rule 59(e) allows 28 days from entry of the judgment,⁸ Rule 59(b) sets the same 28 days for a new-trial motion, and the firm-deadline rule taught earlier in this chapter bars an extension of either period. A single deadline serves the parties and the trial court alike. A losing party who cannot tell whether the flaw lies in the trial or in the judgment need not guess which deadline applies, because both expire on the same day. The trial judge, for the same reason, receives every attack on the result at one time and can resolve them together before any appeal begins. A filing made on the twenty-ninth day has missed the window for each remedy.

The court works inside that window too. Rule 59(d) allows the court, no later than 28 days after the entry of judgment, to order a new trial on its own for any reason that would justify granting one on a party's motion. After notice and an opportunity to be heard, it may also grant a timely new-trial motion for a reason the motion did not state. In either event, the order must specify the reasons.⁹ Each feature does work. The 28-day limit keeps the judge's own initiative from holding a judgment open longer than a litigant could. The notice requirement gives the parties a chance to answer a ground that no one briefed. The statement of reasons leaves a record of why a retrial was ordered, which the losing side and a reviewing court can examine. Rule 59(d) speaks only of new trials, so it belongs on the new-trial side of the comparison.

The affidavit rule belongs there as well. When a motion for a new trial is based on affidavits, they must be filed with the motion; the opposing party has 14 days after being served to file opposing affidavits; and the court may permit reply affidavits.¹⁰ A new-trial motion often depends on facts outside the trial record, so the other side needs a fixed time to answer them. Rule 59(c) is written for a motion for a new trial, and the single sentence of Rule 59(e) contains no comparable affidavit schedule.¹¹