What Rule 60(a) Authorizes

Correcting Clerical Mistakes

What Rule 60(a) Authorizes

A written judgment is supposed to record what the court decided. When the paper and the decision part ways through a slip rather than a choice, Rule 60(a) lets the court bring the paper back into line.

The rule grants that power in a single sentence: "The court may correct a clerical mistake or a mistake arising from oversight or omission whenever one is found in a judgment, order, or other part of the record."¹ The sentence answers three questions: what kind of error the court may fix, where that error may be found, and what the court may do about it.

A clerical error is a minor mistake or inadvertence, especially in writing or copying something on the record, and it does not come from judicial reasoning or determination.² Typing an incorrect number and mistranscribing a word are standard examples. The definition separates a mistake of transcription from a mistake of decision. The judge never reasoned toward a clerical error, so fixing one requires no new judgment. The paradigm case for Rule 60(a) is accordingly a judgment that incorrectly reflects the court's intentions.³ The rule adds a second category, a mistake arising from oversight or omission, so the power does not stop at literal typos: a judgment can go wrong by leaving something out as well as by saying something wrong. The sections that follow take up how far that second category reaches.

The error may sit anywhere in the record. The rule names a judgment, an order, and any "other part of the record," so the power does not wait for the paper that ends the case. In Crye v. Edwards, an Arizona decision, the record did not show that a critical document had been filed on the date claimed, but evidence supported the party's claim that the document had been submitted to the clerk on that date, and the court could correct the error as clerical.⁴ The record misreported a past event, and correction made it report the event accurately.

The remedy is a ministerial procedure. Correction may relieve a party from an erroneous judgment, but it does not require the judgment to be formally reopened or the case to be retried.⁵ That is why the procedure is not very controversial: the court's decision already exists, only its written expression is wrong, and nothing remains to re-decide.

The same feature keeps the power narrow. A motion to alter a judgment is strictly limited to clerical errors. It cannot reach questions about a right to additional recovery or a reduction in an award, and an attempt to reopen the judgment for a nontechnical reason must come by motion for new trial or by appeal.⁶ Rule 60 draws the same line within itself. Clerical mistakes may be corrected at any time, while relief for mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect, for newly discovered evidence, or for fraud must be sought within a reasonable time and no more than one year after the judgment.⁷ If Rule 60(a) stretched to cover a change of decision, a party could use it to avoid those limits.

A gap in the record is a different problem from a wrong entry in it. In re McSoud, a Colorado appellate court considered a mother's argument that the lack of a complete transcript was a clerical error correctable under C.R.C.P. 60(a), so that the trial court should have ordered a new trial for this purpose.⁸ The court disagreed. Set beside Crye, the two cases show which feature matters. In Crye, an existing record was inaccurate and evidence was available to correct it, so correction restored a true record. In McSoud, the mother sought a new trial to supply what the record lacked. A new trial is a new proceeding, and a new proceeding lies outside a power that only conforms the paper to the decision already made.

These examples leave a harder problem for the next section. Parties seldom announce that they want the court to change its mind, and they often describe a substantive change as a correction. Telling a true correction from a substantive attack depends on what the court actually decided, and the label on the motion does not control the answer.