Time Limits

Time Limits

Rule 60(b) lists the grounds on which a court may relieve a party from a final judgment, and Rule 60(c)(1) decides how long a movant has to invoke them.¹ Every motion must be made within a reasonable time. A motion on the first three grounds (mistake or excusable neglect, newly discovered evidence, and fraud or misconduct by an opposing party) must also be made no more than a year after entry of the judgment or order or the date of the proceeding.²

A Rule 60 motion is the last recourse once the time for post-trial motions and appeal has passed, and unlike those earlier routes it “does not affect the judgment’s finality or suspend its operation.” Courts therefore apply Rule 60 ungenerously: they construe it narrowly and enforce its time limits.³ The timing restrictions carry much of the weight, because they protect the stability of judgments by assuring that finality is postponed, not avoided.⁴

Two questions follow. The first is how the two parts of the timing rule work together: every motion must come within a reasonable time, and the first three grounds face an additional outer limit. The second is what happens to a movant whose complaint fits one of those grounds but who has missed the year. A cap that a movant could escape by choosing a different clause would limit no one, so the rules governing how the clauses relate to one another are the other half of this section.

One Year and Reasonable Time

Rule 60(c)(1) puts two clocks on a Rule 60(b) motion. The first runs on every ground and has no fixed length: the motion must be made within a reasonable time. The second runs only on clauses (1), (2), and (3) and has a fixed length: no more than a year after entry of the judgment or order or the date of the proceeding.⁵ The year counts from entry, not from the day the movant learned of the ground.

The three capped grounds share a profile. Each was a recognized ground for relief before the Federal Rules were adopted in 1938, each is concrete, and each has generally been read narrowly so as not to encourage sloppy practices during the first trial.⁶ A fixed outer date suits grounds of that kind. It gives the winner a day after which the judgment is secure, and it presses the loser to raise whatever diligence can reveal while the case is fresh.

Because the rule requires both a reasonable time and the year, a motion can fall inside the year and still come too late. The rule does not define a reasonable time, and courts have discretion in applying its criteria.⁷

The year is therefore an outer limit, not a safe harbor, and a stem that places a motion at eleven months has not finished the timing analysis. The hard edge appears once the year has passed, because no showing of diligence repairs a motion filed after it.

Child Support Enforcement Agency v. Doe shows that edge. The Hawaii family court rule at issue tracks the federal clauses, and the Hawaii Supreme Court relied on federal decisions, so the case persuades a federal court without binding it. A family court had adjudicated Putative Father the legal father of Daughter. More than twenty-two months later, Grandmother, appearing pro se, moved to set the paternity judgment aside under clauses (2) and (3).⁸ The intermediate appellate court agreed that the motion was time-barred under both clauses because it came more than a year after the judgment.⁹

The Supreme Court treated timeliness as a question of power: the timeliness of a Rule 60(b) motion implicates the court’s jurisdiction. It cited federal decisions, among them United States v. Deutsch, where a motion made about two years after judgment fell under clause (1) or (3) and the court held that, because the motion was not filed within a year, the district court had no jurisdiction to consider it. It also cited a Hawaii decision holding that a trial court had “no power” to modify a judgment for mistake once more than a year had elapsed.¹⁰ How strong the movant’s showing was did not enter into that point.

A court without power to grant a late motion cannot cure the lateness by finding good cause, however sympathetic the movant. That is why courts enforce Rule 60’s time limits as written.¹¹ The same instinct governs appeals, where, absent exceptional circumstances, a party may not raise an error it did not first ask the trial court to correct.¹²

The cap does not reach the other grounds. A motion claiming that the judgment is void, that it is no longer equitable, or that some other reason justifies relief faces the reasonable-time requirement but not the one-year limit.¹³ Florida’s parallel rule offers an example. As Bush v. Schiavo recounts, the Second District held that the Schindlers, as interested parties, had standing to seek relief under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.540(b)(5) or to bring an independent action in the guardianship court on the ground that it was no longer equitable for the trial court to enforce its earlier order.¹⁴ Whether a movant whose complaint belongs to the first three grounds can reach these uncapped clauses is the question of the next part.

Mutually Exclusive Grounds

Clause (6) reaches any other reason that justifies relief, and it empowers a court to reopen a judgment even after a year has passed.¹⁷ That difference invites a maneuver. A movant whose complaint is really about neglect, newly discovered evidence, or fraud, and who has let the year run, relabels the same complaint under clause (6). The Supreme Court closed that door in Pioneer Investment Services Co. v. Brunswick Associates Ltd. Partnership: clause (6) and the specific clauses are mutually exclusive, so a party who failed to act in time through excusable neglect may not seek relief after a year by resorting to clause (6).¹⁸ Pioneer drew that rule from Liljeberg v. Health Services Acquisition Corp., and other courts repeat it.¹⁹

The reason follows from what the cap protects. Clauses (1) through (3) cover concrete, long-recognized grounds that courts read narrowly so as not to encourage sloppy practices in the first trial.²⁰ If the catch-all could absorb any such complaint once the year had passed, every late motion for neglect, newly discovered evidence, or fraud would be refiled as a catch-all motion, and the year would limit no one. Treatises state the same result: the catch-all and the other reasons in Rule 60(b) are mutually exclusive, and the catch-all cannot without more be used as an escape from the time limits that usually apply to a relief motion.²¹ The label a movant attaches to a motion therefore does not decide the matter. The complaint does.

Pioneer supplies the working test, and the test turns on fault. To justify relief under clause (6), a party must show extraordinary circumstances suggesting that the party was faultless in the delay. A party who is partly to blame must seek relief within a year under clause (1) and must show that its neglect was excusable.²² Fault is the dividing line because clauses (1) through (3) already supply a remedy, with a deadline attached, for trouble the movant had a hand in. A failure to file on time for reasons beyond the movant’s control is not “neglect” at all under Rule 60(b), so that movant falls outside clause (1) and outside its one-year limit.²³

Klapprott v. United States shows a movant on the right side of that line. The Court explained that the one-year limit would control if the petition disclosed no more than neglect, but the petitioner’s allegations set up an extraordinary situation that could not fairly or logically be classified as mere neglect, so he could use the broad “any other reason” clause.²⁴ He had been effectively prevented from taking a timely appeal by incarceration, ill health, and other factors beyond his reasonable control.²⁵ A man who could not act stood outside a deadline meant to press parties who can. Pioneer cites Ackermann v. United States with Klapprott for the extraordinary-circumstances standard, and the contrast between a faultless movant and one who is partly to blame is what the standard is built to draw.²⁶

The same rule decides a motion that is, in substance, a late motion under clause (1), (2), or (3). In Doe, the intermediate appellate court agreed that Grandmother’s motion was time-barred under clauses (2) and (3). It then reasoned, from federal decisions on ambiguously worded post-trial motions, that the timing of a motion determines its label, and it held that the motion could be considered under clause (6) because the family court had implicitly treated it that way by deciding on substantive grounds.²⁷ That rescue sits uneasily with mutual exclusivity. Grandmother had not cited the wrong rule or no rule; she cited the two clauses that match her grounds and ran out the year.²⁸ Timing may settle the label of a motion that never said which rule it invokes, but it cannot move a complaint that fits clauses (2) and (3) into a clause that Pioneer says those clauses exclude.²⁹

An essay that asks whether clause (6) rescues a late motion is asking first what the movant’s complaint is.

The amount at stake describes the consequence of the judgment, while the cause of the delay chooses the clause. A movant who could not act has a path past the year, and a movant who could have acted and did not has none.