Rule 60.Relief from judgment or order

Rule 60(a) handles the easy case: clerical mistakes in a judgment, order, or other part of the record, and errors that come from oversight or omission, can be corrected by the Court at any time, on its own initiative or on a party's motion, after whatever notice the Court orders.

Rule 60(b) reaches further, letting the Court relieve a party or that party's legal representative from a final judgment, order, or proceeding, on motion and on just terms, for six enumerated reasons: mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect; newly discovered evidence that due diligence couldn't have turned up in time to support a Rule 59(b) new-trial motion; fraud, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, misrepresentation, or other misconduct by an adverse party; a judgment that's void; a judgment that's been satisfied, released, or discharged, or that rests on a prior judgment that's since been reversed or vacated, or that it's no longer equitable to enforce prospectively; or any other reason justifying relief from the judgment's operation. A motion under Rule 60(b) doesn't affect the judgment's finality and doesn't suspend it while the motion is pending.

Rule 60(b) is also careful about what it doesn't displace. It doesn't limit the Court's power to entertain an independent action to relieve a party from a judgment, to grant relief a statute provides, to set aside a judgment for fraud on the Court, or to handle judgments by confession as the law otherwise provides. At the same time, it retires a set of old common-law tools: writs of coram nobis, coram vobis, and audita querela are abolished, and relief from a judgment must instead come by motion under these rules or by an independent action.