What Rule 59(e) Does

Motion to Alter or Amend Judgment

What Rule 59(e) Does

Rule 59(e) fits in a single sentence: a motion to alter or amend a judgment must be filed no later than 28 days after the entry of the judgment.¹ Each phrase carries a piece of the rule. “A judgment” identifies the target, so the motion comes after the court has ruled and entered its decision. “Alter or amend” names the request, which asks the court to change something it has already done. “28 days after the entry” starts the clock at entry of the judgment. Some reference works still state a ten-day period for this motion;² that figure belongs to an earlier version of the rule, and the text quoted here allows 28 days. The rule does not say when a court should grant the motion. For that, we turn to how courts and reference works describe it.

The motion addresses substantive mistakes. A party uses it to ask the court to correct a substantive error in the judgment, such as a manifest error of law or fact.³ It is usually directed at substantive issues like an intervening change in the law or newly discovered evidence that was not available at trial.⁴ Each of these grounds has its own section below.

Slips of the pen belong elsewhere. An error that leaves the judgment not reflecting the court’s intention is a clerical error, and a Rule 59(e) motion should not ordinarily be used to correct it.⁵ A party raises that kind of error in a motion for relief from the judgment, which does not carry the same deadline.⁶ The practical test asks what the party is attacking. A party who says the court decided wrongly fits Rule 59(e); a party who says the judgment fails to record what the court decided fits a motion for relief from the judgment, a subject for a later section.

A Rule 59(e) motion is neither an appeal nor a new lawsuit. In Banister v. Davis, the Court described the motion as a “one-time effort to bring alleged errors in a just-issued decision to a habeas court’s attention” and as “a limited continuation of the original proceeding.”⁷ Because the case arose in habeas, the question was whether such a motion counts as a second or successive habeas application. The Court said it does not. Rule 59(e) imposes strict time limits and allows the district court only to rectify its own mistakes, so the motion belongs to the first proceeding and does not operate as a second one.⁸ The features that drove that holding, the strict deadline and the court’s power to fix only its own errors, come from the rule rather than from habeas law. The movant goes back to the judge who just ruled, in the same case, and asks for a correction.

State practice shows the motion at work. In Jenkins v. Landmark Chevrolet, Inc., the Jenkinses moved to alter, amend, or vacate after the trial court granted summary judgment. The order was not received and filed in the clerk’s office until March 30, 1990, so the Alabama court held that the time to file the motion did not begin to run until that date, and the motion was timely.⁹ The court added that a proper Rule 59(e) motion extends the time for filing a notice of appeal, a point developed later in this chapter.¹⁰

The system gives the trial judge the first chance to correct a judgment for a reason. To prevent unnecessary appellate review, the district court has express authority to entertain a timely motion to alter or amend the judgment under Rule 59, even after a notice of appeal has been filed.¹¹ A judge who corrects a mistake when it surfaces may make the appeal unnecessary.

The motion also connects to a basic rule of appellate practice. Appellate courts are courts of review, not original actions,¹² so the ordinary rule is that, absent exceptional circumstances, a party may not raise on appeal an error it did not first ask the trial court to correct.¹³ A motion to alter or amend is one way to put a substantive mistake before the trial court. A party who never asks the trial court to fix a mistake, by this motion or otherwise, generally cannot complain of it on appeal.