Concept
Making the Motion
Relief from judgment
Making the Motion
A party who wants relief from a final judgment usually asks for it by motion in the court that entered the judgment, still the most common and preferred route.1 Rule 60(b) lists six grounds. The first three are mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect in clause (1); newly discovered evidence in clause (2); and fraud, misrepresentation, or misconduct by an opposing party in clause (3).2 A movant who relies on one of them must raise it within a year of the judgment.3
The earlier sections taught what each clause demands. A movant who fits a clause and files in time still has work left, because the filing raises procedural questions that arise whichever clause the movant invokes. Must the movant show anything before the court reaches the clause? What does the motion do to the judgment while it is pending, and what changes if an appeal is also pending? And when a motion to reconsider could be brought under Rule 59(e) or Rule 60(b), which rule governs? A motion that skips a threshold showing, or lands under the wrong rule, can fail before the court weighs its ground.
Threshold Showings
The text of Rule 60(b) lists six grounds and sets no preliminary conditions, but courts screen motions before they reach the grounds. In the Fourth Circuit the inquiry runs in two stages. The movant first must satisfy three threshold conditions: the motion is timely, the movant has a meritorious defense to the action, and the opposing party would not be unfairly prejudiced by setting the judgment aside. Only then must the movant satisfy one of the six enumerated grounds.4 A bankruptcy court applied this approach in a dispute over leased trailers, and its opinion supplies the examples below. The conditions come from Fourth Circuit decisions, not from the rule's wording, so an answer should present them as one circuit's approach and not as something Rule 60(b) itself demands.5
The three conditions share a purpose. A rematch costs the court and the winner real effort, so a judgment should be reopened only when reopening can accomplish something. Courts repeatedly say that Rule 60(b) is not a substitute for appeal, that finality should not be lightly disturbed, and that they must consider and protect good-faith reliance on the judgment. A movant who asks to litigate again must show a meritorious claim or defense, and the deck is stacked against the motion.6
Timeliness comes first. In the trailer dispute, an interim order on a stay motion was meant to be only interim, but it became a final adjudication when the Debtors defaulted on their adequate protection payments and the automatic stay was modified.7 The Debtors moved for reconsideration almost immediately after the default and after Peak demanded the trailers back, and the court called the timing undoubtedly reasonable.8 Delay can cost a movant more than a failed screen. The Hawaii Supreme Court treated the timeliness of a motion under the state's parallel rule as implicating the family court's jurisdiction. It cited federal circuit decisions and an earlier Hawaii case holding that a trial court had no power to modify a mistake under clause (1) once more than a year had passed.9
The meritorious-defense condition asks for less than its name suggests. The movant need not show likely success. The movant must make allegations that, if established, would constitute a valid claim or defense.10 The Debtors had argued from the start that the lease agreements were disguised security agreements, which would let them restructure the debt through their plan and would be cause to deny the stay motion. The court held that this allegation alone met the threshold, and it added that the court had ultimately agreed with the Debtors.11 The low bar suits the condition's job, which is to screen out motions where a second round would be pointless. The court does not try the merits at the threshold.
The condition still requires an allegation. One appellant's Rule 60(b) papers alleged nothing about the merit of its claim, and on appeal it argued that the district court, unguided, should have searched the plaintiffs' belated opposition to the defendants' Rule 56(c) motion, filed fourteen months earlier, for a winnable claim. The court of appeals disagreed. It would make no sense to require a busy trial court to excuse the lack of any allegation of meritoriousness and then hunt for usable material in the earlier record, unassisted by the party who would benefit. Courts may expect represented parties to put all relevant arguments in the papers that address the pending motion.12 The condition also survives in default cases. Even where the law disfavors default judgments, the movant must show a meritorious defense and, often, that she did not contribute to the default through knowing or inexcusable inaction.13
The prejudice condition looks at the winner's position. Peak alleged no specific prejudice, and the court observed that Peak was better off than if the stay motion had been denied at the outset, because Peak had received more in direct adequate protection payments than it might have received through the plan in that period.14 Every winner would rather keep the judgment, so the condition must look for a concrete cost, such as the harm that follows when others have relied on the judgment in good faith.
The trial court has broad discretion over each of these calls.15 On appeal the ruling is reviewed for abuse of discretion. The Hawaii Supreme Court applied that standard to a motion under the state's parallel rule, which persuades a federal court without binding it.16 The first filing is therefore the movant's best chance to put the right allegations before the trial court. Appellate courts review, and absent exceptional circumstances a party may not raise on appeal an error it did not first ask the trial court to correct.17
Exam answers go wrong in two directions here. Some treat the three conditions as text of Rule 60(b) that every court applies. Others treat them as enough to win, when they only open the door to the enumerated grounds.
Finality and Pending Appeals
The judgment stays final while a Rule 60(b) motion is pending, and it keeps operating. The motion “does not affect the judgment's finality or suspend its operation.”20 The winner may therefore enforce the judgment as though no motion had been filed until a court grants relief. A loser who files gains a hearing, not a pause, and a weak motion cannot freeze the winner's collection. The harder question arises when the loser has also appealed.
An appeal limits what the district court can do with the motion, though not whether it can receive the motion. A district court cannot grant relief that a pending appeal bars. If the motion is brought while the judgment is on appeal, the court may deny it or, if inclined to grant it, indicate that inclination and let the movant apply to the court of appeals for a remand.21
Rule 62.1, adopted in 2009, supplies the mechanism, called an indicative ruling. When a timely motion seeks relief that the pendency of an appeal otherwise bars, the district court may defer consideration, deny the motion, or state either that it would grant the motion if the court of appeals remanded or that the motion “raises a substantial issue.” If the court gives the favorable statement, the movant must promptly notify the court of appeals under Appellate Rule 12.1, and the district court may decide the motion once the court of appeals remands for that purpose.22 The district court signals what it would do, and the court of appeals decides whether to send the case back.
Once the court of appeals has acted, the district court's room depends on what the appellate court already considered. In DeWeerth v. Baldinger, the court read Eutectic Corp. v. Metco, Inc. to decide only that a district court lacks jurisdiction to alter an appellate ruling when the appellate court has already considered and rejected the basis for the movant's Rule 60(b) motion. Eutectic did not address the rule of Standard Oil that a district court may consider a Rule 60(b) motion when “later events” arise that the appellate court did not consider.23 The line falls between arguments the appellate court has decided and later events it never saw.
A denial entered after the notice of appeal needs an appeal of its own. In Ingraham v. United States, the government had not raised a Texas statute at trial. It appealed the judgment and then filed a Rule 60(b) motion relying on the statute. The district court denied the motion, and the government did not appeal the denial. The court of appeals held that the issue raised only in the motion was not before it, because a ruling on a motion filed after the notice of appeal must be appealed separately to be reviewed.
Three errors recur on exams. One says the winner must wait while a motion is pending, but the judgment keeps operating. Another says the district court can do nothing with a motion once an appeal is noticed, but the court may receive the motion and deny it or issue an indicative ruling. The third treats a denial entered after the notice of appeal as automatically before the court of appeals, when it needs an appeal of its own.
Rule 59(e) or Rule 60(b)
A party who wants a court to revisit a judgment it just entered has two possible motions, and the calendar decides between them. Any judgment, whether by default or after trial, may be altered or amended on a motion made and filed within 28 days after entry. Thereafter the judgment may be attacked, other than by appeal, only as Rule 60 provides.27 A late movant must then fit a listed ground, each with its own time limits.28 The earlier sections taught what those grounds require. This part asks which motion a given filing is in the first place.
The two motions do different work. A motion to alter or amend asks the court to correct a substantive error in the judgment, such as a manifest error of law or fact.29 Rule 60(b)'s first three grounds were well-recognized grounds for relief even before the 1938 adoption of the Federal Rules, and courts read them narrowly so as not to encourage sloppy practices during the first trial.30
The two motions meet at newly discovered evidence. Clause (2) reaches evidence that, with reasonable diligence, could not have been discovered in time to move for a new trial under Rule 59(b), so evidence the movant could have found in time falls outside it.31 Evidence that surfaces later can still be raised under clause (2) within the one-year limit.32
Older materials give a shorter period. The version of Rule 59(e) quoted in Davis v. United States required that a motion to alter or amend be served “not later than 10 days after entry of the judgment.”33 The current rule allows 28 days, so a ten-day figure in an older opinion must be read against that longer period.34
Parties do not always name a rule. When a movant cites the wrong rule or none, courts commonly treat the motion as brought under the appropriate rule. For an ambiguous “motion for reconsideration” that could arise under either Rule 59(e) or Rule 60(b), the Hawaii intermediate appellate court, relying on federal circuit decisions, reasoned that the timing of the post-trial motion determines its label.35 That court then treated a motion that was time-barred under clauses (2) and (3) as properly brought under clause (6), which requires only a reasonable time, and it concluded that the family court had implicitly considered the motion under clause (6) by deciding it on substantive rather than procedural grounds.36 That rescue sits uneasily with the rule, taken up earlier in this chapter, that the catch-all and the specific grounds are mutually exclusive. What carries over from the opinion is the first step: timing identifies which rule a bare motion invokes.
The label matters because it changes what the court examines. A timely motion lets the trial court correct its own substantive errors. A dismissal for ordinary misconduct entered without asking whether the suit has any possible merit is the kind of oversight the court can fix itself. In one appeal of that kind, the court faulted the district court for dismissing without considering the likely merits of Olson's claims. It noted that the defendants had never moved for dismissal or summary judgment before the final pretrial conference and had joined settlement negotiations.37
An exam stem that says a party moved to “reconsider” the judgment is asking for a date comparison before anything else.
The fourth step also keeps Rule 60(b) from becoming a second chance at the arguments the earlier motion existed to carry. Courts read clauses (1) through (3) narrowly so as not to encourage sloppy practices during the first trial,38 so a late motion that only repeats a complaint about how the court weighed the evidence rarely fits one of them.