Concept
Other Routes to Relief
Relief from judgment
Other Routes to Relief
A final judgment can be undone in more ways than the first three grounds of Rule 60(b) suggest. Rule 60(d) says so at the outset: the rule “does not limit a court’s power to” act in the ways it goes on to list.1 Those preserved powers sit beside the grounds in subdivision (b), and together they form a ladder of remedies, each rung harder to reach than the one below.
The lowest rung reopens nothing. A court can correct a clerical mistake, or an omission or oversight made when it entered the judgment, on a party’s motion or on its own. Correction is ministerial: it may relieve a party from an erroneous entry, but it neither formally reopens the judgment nor calls for a retrial.2
The next rung holds the first three grounds of Rule 60(b). Within one year of judgment, a party may seek relief for mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect;3 for newly discovered evidence;4 or for fraud, misrepresentation, or misconduct by an opposing party.5 Each was a recognized ground before the Federal Rules took effect in 1938, each is concrete, and courts generally read each narrowly so that relief does not reward sloppy practice at the first trial. After one year, none of the three can be raised.6
The remaining rungs are the subject of this unit, and the table below maps them. The time limits for clauses (4) through (6) come from the earlier discussion of reasonable time; the rest is developed in the sections that follow.
| Route | Time limit | What the movant must show |
|---|---|---|
| Clause (6), the catch-all | Reasonable time | Extraordinary circumstances |
| Clause (4), void judgment | Reasonable time | The court lacked power, or the process denied due process |
| Clause (5), satisfied or prospective judgment | Reasonable time | Satisfaction, a vacated predicate judgment, or that continued application is no longer equitable |
| Independent action | Laches only | A grave miscarriage of justice |
| Fraud on the court | None, not even laches | An effort to corrupt the judicial process itself |
The pattern is a trade. Where the rules loosen the clock, they raise the showing the movant must make.
The Catch-All Clause
Rule 60(b) closes with a sixth ground that permits relief for “any other reason that justifies relief.”7 The words sound limitless, and the clause carries no one-year cap. Courts therefore police it from two directions: they confine it to complaints the other clauses do not reach, and they demand an extraordinary showing before they apply it.
The first limit keeps the catch-all from swallowing the deadlines. A movant under subsection (6) must show “extraordinary circumstances” suggesting that the movant is faultless in the delay. A movant who is partly to blame must seek relief within one year under subsection (1), and the neglect must be excusable.8 The petitioner in Klapprott illustrates the faultless movant: incarceration, ill health, and other factors beyond his reasonable control had effectively prevented a timely appeal.9 The appellant in Deutsch illustrates the other side. About two years after judgment he moved for “reconsideration.” The Seventh Circuit treated the motion as one under Rule 60(b) rather than Rule 59, because it came more than ten days after judgment, found that the grounds asserted fell under clause (1) or clause (3), and held that the district court could not consider a motion filed outside the one-year limit.10
The second limit is the standard itself. Rule 60(b) vests wide discretion in the courts, but relief under the catch-all is available only in “extraordinary circumstances.”11 In deciding whether they exist, a court may consider a wide range of factors, including, in an appropriate case, “the risk of injustice to the parties” and “the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the judicial process.”12 The Second Circuit states the test in similar words: the clause is properly invoked where there are extraordinary circumstances or where the judgment may work an extreme and undue hardship.13 Because the standard is a weighing and not a list of elements, two decisions teach it best. Each reversed a trial court, one for denying relief and the other for granting it.
Buck v. Davis shows the weighing tipping toward relief. At Buck’s capital sentencing, his own lawyer, not the prosecutor, first elicited testimony that injected race into the proceeding.14 When Buck first sought federal habeas relief in 2004, Coleman barred the federal court from hearing his claim. Later decisions, Martinez and Trevino, allow federal review of a claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel that was defaulted in a Texas postconviction proceeding, if state habeas counsel was constitutionally ineffective in failing to raise it and the claim has some merit.15 Buck moved under clause (6) to reopen the federal judgment. The district court denied the motion. It reasoned that a change in decisional law is rarely extraordinary by itself, that the State’s promise not to oppose resentencing counted for little because Buck’s lawyer had elicited the testimony, and that the racial testimony played only a “de minimis” role.16 The Supreme Court held that the denial was an abuse of discretion.17
Three features of the Court’s reasoning match the factors the standard names. The first is the risk of injustice. Having found prejudice, the Court concluded that Buck may have been sentenced to death in part because of his race, a disturbing departure from the premise that the law punishes people for what they do and not for who they are, and it agreed that it stretches credulity to call his claim run-of-the-mill.18 The second is public confidence: relying on race to impose a criminal sanction poisons public confidence in the judicial process, a concern that itself supports relief.19 The third is the State’s own conduct. Texas’s Attorney General had confessed error in Saldano and in cases acknowledged as similar, and the State’s reasons for treating Buck differently had nothing to do with the Attorney General’s stated reasons. Race went to the jury as a factor to weigh in all of those cases, whichever side first raised it.20
Finality, ordinarily the winner’s best argument, counted for little. The whole purpose of Rule 60(b), the Court said, is to make an exception to finality, and the State’s interest deserved little weight: by confessing error in similar cases, Texas had effectively acknowledged that its people have no interest in enforcing a capital sentence obtained on so flawed a basis.21 The change in law played a supporting role. Buck could obtain relief only if Martinez and Trevino, rather than Coleman, would govern his claim once the case was reopened, because otherwise the claim would stay unreviewable and relief would be inappropriate.22 The change made reopening worthwhile; the extraordinary circumstances came from the sentencing and the State’s response to it.
Even the dissent described the test as unchanged, and its emphasis shows how demanding the test remains. A very strict reading of Rule 60(b) is essential if the finality of judgments is to be preserved, extraordinary circumstances will rarely occur in the habeas context, a change in law alone is not enough, and appellate review of a denial of relief is limited and deferential.23
The Second Circuit’s decision in DeWeerth shows the same weighing coming out the other way. Mrs. DeWeerth had invoked federal diversity jurisdiction, and the panel in her first appeal predicted the content of state law. An authoritative pronouncement in Guggenheim soon corrected that prediction, and the Second Circuit later acknowledged that the earlier panel’s prediction was wrong.24 The district court granted relief under clause (6), reasoning that the interest in finality was outweighed by the need to prevent extreme and undue hardship, to accomplish substantial justice, and to act with appropriate regard for the principles of federalism.25 The Second Circuit reversed. It held that the district court abused its discretion in finding that the interest in the finality of a judgment more than four years old was outweighed by any injustice DeWeerth believed she had suffered by litigating in a federal rather than a state forum.26
The court also explained why the decisions the district court had relied on did not control. In one of them, a court recalled its mandate in part because the original ruling had placed continuing obligations on the defendant whose validity was now suspect, whereas the judgment against DeWeerth was finite and carried no ongoing consequences. The other decisions, such as Pierce v. Cook & Co., shared fewer facts with the case and offered even less persuasive authority.27 The majority’s concern, as the dissent quoted it, was that relief would be “simply an improvident course that would encourage countless attacks on federal judgments long since closed.”28 A judgment that rests on a prediction of state law is exactly the kind a later contrary state decision could threaten, and if each such decision reopened the cases before it, repose would be unavailable for any of them. The mere possibility of reopening does not weaken the judgment in the meantime: a federal diversity judgment that may be vacated for a later change in state law remains final until a court vacates it, just as a judgment open to attack on after-discovered evidence does.29
The dissent would have affirmed. Little more than two and a half years separated the denial of certiorari in the first appeal from the Guggenheim decision, Rule 60 exists as a remedy in an extraordinary case to accomplish justice, and the court, not the litigant who invoked federal jurisdiction, should bear the cost of its own error. Finality addresses an important interest, the dissent said, but it should not deter relief merely because unworthy movants may invoke the rule later.30 That judges divide on where this line falls explains why a trial court’s ruling receives only deferential review.31
Set side by side, the two decisions show which facts move the answer.
| Factor | Buck | DeWeerth |
|---|---|---|
| What was at stake | A death sentence that may rest in part on race | A ruling later shown wrong on state law, litigated in a federal rather than a state forum |
| The winner’s interest in finality | Little weight; the State had acknowledged no interest in enforcing so flawed a sentence | A finite judgment more than four years old, with no ongoing consequences |
| Role of the change in law | Made the claim reviewable if the case were reopened | Not enough to outweigh finality |
| Result | Denial of relief reversed as an abuse of discretion | Grant of relief reversed as an abuse of discretion |
The usual bait in an exam stem is a favorable change in the law, a large judgment, or a sympathetic movant, offered as if any one of them were extraordinary alone. The question to put to each is what is at stake beyond the movant’s own loss, and whether the winner’s interest in repose has weakened.
Void and Prospective Judgments
Clause (4) permits relief when “the judgment is void,” and clause (5) permits relief when the judgment has been satisfied, released, or discharged, rests on an earlier judgment that has been reversed or vacated, or can no longer equitably be applied going forward.35 Both clauses are narrower than their wording suggests. Clause (4) comes first, because its limits explain why it can run without a one-year cap.
A judgment is void when the court had no power to enter it, for want of jurisdiction over the subject matter or the parties, or when the proceeding denied due process. Voidness is a defect in the court’s authority or in the fairness of its process, not a defect in its reasoning. A judgment that rests on a legal mistake, even one exposed when a later decision holds the underlying statute unconstitutional, is erroneous and not void, because the court had power and the process was fair. An appeal exists to correct errors of that kind.
Default judgments are where voidness questions most often arise. A default judgment rests on a default, meaning that the defendant failed to plead or otherwise defend within the time the rules set.36 A defendant who was never served stands outside that framework, because a court acquires power over a defendant through valid service and a valid basis for personal jurisdiction, and a judgment entered without them is void. A defendant who was served and simply ignored the suit holds a valid default judgment and must look to another ground to attack it.
The missing one-year cap follows from what voidness means. A judgment entered without power never gained binding force, so the movant’s delay cannot validate it, and the winner’s reliance on it deserves little protection. Clause (4) therefore carries only the reasonable-time requirement that governs this group of clauses.
An exam stem that calls a judgment “wrong” or “unconstitutional” has therefore described an error, and the question to ask is whether the court lacked power over the defendant or denied fair process when it acted.
Clause (5) deals with judgments that were valid when entered but have since lost their footing, and it covers three situations.38
- A judgment that has been satisfied, released, or discharged, where continued enforcement would give the winner a second recovery on a debt already paid.
- A judgment that rests on an earlier judgment since reversed or vacated.
- A judgment whose prospective application is no longer equitable, which matters mainly for injunctions and consent decrees.
The third situation carries most of the weight in practice. A decree that directs future conduct keeps operating long after entry, and the court that issued it could not see the future when it spoke. For such a decree, the movant must show a significant change in factual conditions or in law that makes continued enforcement inequitable, and the movant cannot rest on events that were anticipated when the decree was entered.
Agostini v. Felton shows the standard at work. Consent decrees required a school board to refrain from providing Title I services on the premises of sectarian schools. Later decisions of the Supreme Court had undermined the presumptions on which Aguilar relied; among them, the Court held that the Establishment Clause did not prevent a school district from furnishing a disabled child with a sign-language interpreter at a sectarian school, because that was a neutral service that created no danger of religious indoctrination.39 The Court held that the district court abused its discretion in refusing to modify the decrees. The board was entitled to relief under Rule 60(b)(5) because the judgments had prospective application and it was no longer equitable that they should. The board bore a heavy burden, and it carried that burden.40
Horne v. Flores applies the same clause in a different setting. The court of appeals there had asked, in effect, whether a 2000 order had been satisfied. Satisfaction is only one of the bases Rule 60(b)(5) lists, and the petitioners could obtain relief on the independent basis that prospective enforcement of the order was “no longer equitable.” The proper inquiry was whether the order’s ongoing enforcement was supported by an ongoing violation of the statute.41 A bankruptcy court applied the clause on a smaller scale. An interim order contained a “drop dead” provision. After the court ultimately agreed with the debtors that the lease agreements were disguised security agreements, it found that enforcing the provision going forward would deprive the debtors of a fair opportunity to confirm their plan, was inequitable and detrimental to the public interest, and modified that part of the order under clause (5).42
An exam stem that pairs a change in law with a continuing decree therefore points to clause (5), and the movant still carries the burden of proving a significant change and an inequity going forward.43 A stem that pairs the same change in law with a finished money judgment points away from clause (5).
Independent Actions and Fraud on the Court
Rule 60(d) names powers that survive alongside Rule 60(b). A court may entertain an independent action to relieve a party from a judgment, order, or proceeding;46 it may grant relief under 28 U.S.C. § 1655 to a defendant who was not personally notified of the action, a power this chapter does not develop; and it may set aside a judgment for fraud on the court.47 An independent action is a new lawsuit whose only purpose is to undo an earlier judgment. Fraud on the court is a ground for setting a judgment aside that rests on the court’s own equitable authority and not on any clause of Rule 60(b). Both are equitable devices, and they matter because the rules authorizing motions are limited, most of all when a restriction in those rules would otherwise stop a court from responding to a serious wrong.48
Rule 60(e) clears away the old procedural vocabulary around these routes: bills of review, bills in the nature of bills of review, and writs of coram nobis, coram vobis, and audita querela are abolished.49 The independent action survives. In United States v. Beggerly, the Court invoked the Advisory Committee’s explanation that if the right to make a motion is lost because the rules’ time limits have expired, the only other procedural remedy is a new or independent action to set the judgment aside on the principles historically applied in such actions.50 That explanation makes the independent action the backstop behind the motion. Beggerly also quotes an older decision about how the new suit relates to the old one. For jurisdictional purposes, the later suit may be regarded as ancillary to the earlier, so that the court that made the decree may grant the relief asked without regard to the citizenship of the parties, because the new bill, though original in form, is a continuation of the former suit.51
The equitable routes differ from a motion in ways that explain why a loser might reach for them. An independent action may be brought in a court other than the one that rendered the judgment, while a motion for relief cannot. A motion must also meet the time limits in the rules, which is not true of the equitable devices. The right to bring an independent action is restricted only by laches, the equitable doctrine that bars a claimant whose unreasonable delay has prejudiced the other side. An application to set a judgment aside for fraud on the court has no time limit and is not even barred by laches, and some courts have opened judgments on their own motion under this reserve power.52 The missing deadline follows from the purpose. A judgment obtained by corrupting the judicial process cannot claim the repose that finality otherwise earns, so the power to undo it should not expire while the corruption stays hidden.
The same missing deadline explains why the routes are confined to rare cases. If any complaint that missed the one-year cap could be refiled as a new lawsuit, the cap on mistake, new evidence, and fraud would limit no one. For the independent action, the Supreme Court has made clear that, at least in the federal courts, the remedy is available only to prevent a grave miscarriage of justice.53 A loser who merely missed the year for newly discovered evidence has not shown such a miscarriage by missing it, because the equitable route would otherwise nullify the cap. For all these reasons, the most common and preferred means of seeking relief remains a motion in the court that entered the judgment.54
Fraud on the court is narrow because the phrase has a specific meaning. An application to set a judgment aside for fraud generally lies only for fraud on the court, not merely fraud between the parties. The line is elusive, but fraud on the court generally involves something designed to corrupt or taint the judicial process itself, not merely to keep the opposing party from prevailing. Simple perjury generally does not qualify, although an attempt to bribe the judge does, and the circumstances that do qualify are extremely limited.55 The line tracks who can answer the wrong. A witness’s lie or a party’s concealment injures the opponent, who has cross-examination, discovery, and a motion under clause (3) as answers.56 A bribe compromises the one person whose impartial decision the adversary system assumes, so the ordinary tools of the contest cannot correct it. Without the line, every clause (3) complaint could be recast as fraud on the court to escape the year. A second filter applies as well. Clause (3) itself reaches fraud “whether previously called intrinsic or extrinsic,” but for the equitable challenge most courts allow only extrinsic fraud and refuse intrinsic fraud.57
The bribe in the second scene also fits clause (3) as misconduct by an opposing party, so a loser who learned of it within the year could proceed there.58 Fraud on the court matters once the year has passed, which is the situation an exam stem builds by reporting a late discovery.
The first three grounds of Rule 60(b) are the everyday tools for attacking a judgment after the post-trial deadlines, and the equitable routes in Rule 60(d) are the rare backstop behind them. An exam stem that reports a late discovery of wrongdoing therefore calls for sorting before any talk of equity. A lie or concealment between the parties belongs to clause (3) and its year, while only an effort to corrupt the court itself, or a grave miscarriage of justice shown in an independent action, opens a route that outlasts the year.