Purpose of the New Trial Motion

The Motion for a New Trial

Purpose of the New Trial Motion

A motion for a new trial under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59 asks the trial court to set aside a result it has just produced and to decide the dispute again. The rule's opening clause says that the court may, on motion, grant a new trial on all or some of the issues, and to any party.¹ The remedy is a do-over: after a jury trial the case goes to a fresh jury, and after a nonjury trial the judge rehears the matter. Granting the motion declares no winner. The party who lost the first verdict receives no judgment, and the party who won it has lost nothing final, because both sides return to the starting line.²

Each part of that opening clause carries its own consequence. Because the court acts on motion, a dissatisfied party ordinarily sets the process going, although a later section shows that the judge may also act without a request. Because the new trial may cover all or some of the issues, the court can retry only the claim, the defense, or the damages question that is flawed and leave the sound parts of the verdict alone. And because the relief runs to any party, a defendant attacking a liability verdict and a plaintiff attacking an inadequate damages award stand on the same footing. The remedy is therefore flexible and aimed at a particular defect in the first trial, which is why its use looks so different from the use of judgment as a matter of law.

The purpose of the motion comes into focus when it is set beside renewed judgment as a matter of law, the other way a losing party attacks a jury's result. That motion tests legal sufficiency: the judge may not weigh the evidence or judge the credibility of witnesses, and must construe all reasonable doubts against the party seeking relief.³ A successful motion takes the case from the jury and enters judgment for the movant, which is why the result is described as zero-sum.⁴ The motion is built this way because it asks only one question, whether the party with the burden of production offered enough for a reasonable jury to find in that party's favor. If the answer is no, the law names the opponent the winner and no second trial is needed.

Haster's motion for judgment as a matter of law cannot succeed on these facts, because Chapman did testify to the contact and to the throbbing leg, and a reasonable jury could find both liability and some injury from that testimony.⁵ The defect lies in the size of the award, and perhaps in how the trial was run, rather than in an absence of evidence. When the evidence is enough to reach the jury, the judge has no power to declare a winner, since only a jury can do that.⁶ The remedy for a verdict that is excessive, or tainted by an erroneous instruction or by juror misconduct, is therefore a new trial. Chapman loses her verdict but keeps her right to a jury, because she must only try her case to a new one.

A new trial motion starts from a different premise. It assumes that the evidence was sufficient to reach the jury and that the verdict is one a reasonable jury could return, and it asks whether the verdict is nevertheless clearly erroneous, either because it runs against the weight of the evidence or because a flawed trial process produced it or could have.⁷ Answering that question lets the judge do what judgment as a matter of law forbids: weigh the evidence and assess credibility, with no duty to resolve doubts against the movant.⁸ In that role the judge acts to some extent as a thirteenth juror, making an independent assessment of how strong the proof is.⁹

What if the trial was fair, the evidence rationally supports the verdict, and the judge simply would have voted the other way as a juror? Disagreement alone does not justify a new trial, because the judge must be convinced that the verdict is seriously erroneous, as when it runs against the clear weight of the evidence, before a second jury is warranted.¹⁰ The limit protects the jury's role. If a judge could order a new trial whenever another result seemed preferable, verdicts would survive only when the judge would have reached the same result, and repeated new trials would reduce the first jury to a rehearsal.¹¹ The Chapman verdict clears that line because $1.6 million for a throbbing leg is far out of proportion to the proof, while a verdict that falls within what the evidence rationally supports does not.

That limit still leaves the trial judge more room on a new trial motion than on judgment as a matter of law, and the reason lies in the jury right. A party whose verdict is wiped out by judgment as a matter of law can say that the court took the case from the jury. A party whose verdict is set aside for a new trial can complain only of getting too much jury trial, because a second jury, not the judge, will decide the case.¹² Trial courts therefore usually have wider discretion to grant a new trial than to direct a verdict or disregard the jury's verdict.¹³ A second reason supports that breadth: the trial judge watched the whole proceeding and can weigh the cumulative effect of rulings and courtroom events, correcting an error on the spot instead of waiting for an appeal that might end in reversal.¹⁴ Against these benefits stands the cost of a second trial to the parties and the court, which is why the power is used cautiously.¹⁵

Rule 59 itself supplies no list of grounds. After a jury trial it points back to any reason for which a new trial had been granted in federal actions at law before the rule, and it leaves the content of that phrase to decided cases.¹⁶ Those decisions sort into three recurring families of grounds, which the next section takes up.