Concept
When Judgment Is Entered
Entry of judgment on a general verdict
When Judgment Is Entered
Many important matters, including the time to appeal and the time to make post-trial motions, turn on the date a judgment is entered, so Rule 58(c) fixes that date by rule.1 Where no separate document is required, judgment is entered when it is recorded in the civil docket under Rule 79(a). Where one is required, judgment is entered when it is recorded there and the earlier of two further events has occurred.2 The two events are the setting out of the judgment in a separate document and the passage of 150 days from the docket entry, and the subsections below take them in that order.3 Until a judgment has been noted on the docket, it is not effective.4
A rule this exact reflects a history of trouble. The date of entry had been a source of considerable confusion, Rule 58 was amended in 1963 to remove it, and the rule was completely rewritten in 2002 to cure the problems that remained.5 The rewritten rule deems a judgment entered when it is set out in a separate document or when 150 days have run from its entry in the civil docket, whichever is earlier.6 The first route gives a readily fixed date whenever the court side does its part. The second keeps a lapse there from leaving the date open indefinitely. The clerk's duty to prepare and enter the judgment, covered in the preceding sections, produces the document; this rule decides the day on which the judgment counts as entered.
Separate Document Rule
Every judgment and amended judgment must be set out in a separate document, though the rule excuses an order disposing of certain motions that it lists.7 The judgment is therefore a paper of its own. It is not the court's opinion, not the jury's verdict form, and not a docket note that a verdict came in, and a court cannot fold the judgment into one of those papers and call the result the judgment. After a general verdict, the paper the clerk prepares and enters under the rules discussed earlier in this chapter is the paper that must take this form.
The requirement exists because so much depends on the date of entry. The time to appeal and the time to make post-trial motions both run from that date, so each party must be able to tell which paper is the judgment in order to know when those clocks began. If a judgment could be found in an opinion, a verdict form, or a docket note, two lawyers reading the same file could name different papers and so different dates, and the one who guessed wrong might lose the right to appeal. A single identifiable document ends that dispute, and Rule 58(a) states the requirement in so many words.8
Setting out the judgment in a separate document is also the first of the two events that fix the date of entry. When a separate document is required, judgment is entered once it is recorded in the civil docket under Rule 79(a) and the earlier of two events occurs, the first being that the judgment is set out in a separate document.9 The document identifies the judgment, and the docket entry places it in the court's record on a particular day; the judgment is not effective before that day.10
Students often treat the verdict announced in open court, or the court's opinion, as the judgment and count deadlines from there. The verdict is the jury's finding and the opinion is the court's explanation; neither is the judgment, which must stand in a document of its own. However thorough the opinion or exact the dollar figure on the verdict form, the separate-document event has not occurred until a distinct judgment is set out.
A party who sees that no separate document has issued need not wait for the court to notice the gap. Rule 58(d) lets a party request that judgment be set out in a separate document as Rule 58(a) requires.11 Because that document is the first route to a fixed date of entry, the request gives a litigant a direct way to obtain a definite starting point for the deadlines in the case.
A pending dispute over costs or fees does not hold up entry. Rule 58(e) declares that entry of judgment is not to be delayed for the taxing of costs.12 More fully, entry of judgment ordinarily may not be delayed, nor the time for appeal extended, in order to tax costs or award fees.13 Costs and fees are worked out after the merits are decided and can be contested at length. If entry waited on them, the date that starts the appeal and post-trial clocks would float until a side dispute ended, and the decided merits would sit in suspense.
The word ordinarily leaves one narrow opening. If a timely motion for attorney's fees is made under Rule 54(d)(2), the court may act before a notice of appeal has been filed and order that the motion have the same effect under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(4) as a timely motion under Rule 59.14 That opening concerns how the fee motion affects the appeal clock, and it depends on a court order made before the notice of appeal is filed. Without such an order the default holds: a fee motion neither postpones entry nor extends the time to appeal.
The 150-Day Backstop
The second event is the passage of time, and it needs no act from anyone. When a separate document is required, judgment is entered once it is recorded in the civil docket and the earlier of two events occurs: the judgment is set out in a separate document, or 150 days have run from the entry in the civil docket.19 The first event depends on the court side doing its work; the second depends on nothing but the calendar; whichever comes first fixes the date. A clerk who promptly prepares and enters a separate judgment never reaches the 150 days, so the backstop matters only when the first route has failed.
The backstop answers a problem the old rule created. Before the 2002 amendments, the majority view was that the period for appeal never began to run if the district court docketed an order but failed to set it out on a separate document.20 The loser then had no deadline, because the clock never started, and the winner had no finality, because an appeal might come at any time. The 2002 amendment added the 150-day rule so that parties would not be given forever to appeal, or to bring a post-judgment motion, when a court fails to set out the judgment separately.21
The design puts an outer limit on finality that no longer depends on the clerk's diligence, and its price falls on the party who waits. A litigant who counts from the arrival of a formal judgment document may find that the 150 days, and then the 30 days for a notice of appeal, have already run out.
Stephanie-Cardona LLC v. Smith's Food & Drug Centers, Inc. shows that price being paid. A stipulation and order docketed in the district court dismissed the remaining claims with prejudice and denied the plaintiff all relief, most of its other claims having already fallen to summary judgment.22 The order itself recited that the case was ripe for entry of final judgment, and at that point the clerk should have prepared a separate judgment and entered it without specific direction from the court.23 The clerk did not promptly do so, and that failure did not keep the clock from running.24 The case arose from an order denying all relief and not from a general verdict, but the 150-day mechanics are the same, because they depend only on whether a separate document is required and whether one was set out in time.
Because the outcome turns on counting forward from a single docket date, the analysis runs best as a calendar exercise, and the dates in this case supply the numbers:
The court rested on the text: judgment is entered when it is set out in a separate document or when 150 days have run, whichever is earlier.27 The district court issued a separate judgment only after more than 150 days had passed, so the 150-day event came first, judgment was entered as a matter of law on November 15, 2004, and the 30 days for the notice of appeal ran from that date.28 Had the clerk issued a separate judgment promptly, that document would have been the earlier event, and entry would date from it. The opinion cites the 150-day provision as Rule 58(b)(2), the rule's earlier numbering; the same text now sits in Rule 58(c)(2).
The Ninth Circuit had applied the same rule in earlier decisions, among them Ford v. MCI Communication Corp. Health & Welfare Plan, Peng v. Mei Chin Penghu, and ABF Capital Corp. v. Osley. In one of them, a notice of appeal filed before the 150 days had run was held timely, and in ABF Capital the court held that the time to appeal began 150 days after the final order and that a notice filed within 180 days of that order was timely.29 The 180 days are the 150 for entry plus the 30 for the notice. A notice that falls inside that window survives, and a notice outside it, as in Stephanie-Cardona, does not.
The usual error on an exam stem is to treat the clerk's delay as something that postpones the appeal deadline, or to keep waiting for a formal judgment that, on the facts, was never prepared. A clerk's lapse leaves the calendar in charge. The 150 days begin with the docket entry whether or not anyone has prepared the paper, so the losing party must count from the docket and file within the 180 days, or secure the separate document early enough to make it the earlier event.