Amending the Complaint After Losing the Case

The U.S. Supreme Court has two cases on its docket this year addressing attempts to amend a complaint or petition after the case has already been decided in the trial court and gone to the court of appeals. BLOM Bank SAL v. Honickman, decided today, is a regular civil case.  Rivers v. Guerrero is a habeas corpus case, in which CJLF has filed an amicus brief.

Today’s decision in BLOM Bank looks very good for the prospect of success in Rivers. It is in line with the approach of our Rivers brief .

The cases involve two of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rules 15 and 60. Although habeas corpus these days is generally used to collaterally attack criminal judgments, it is not a criminal proceeding. In federal courts, there is a special set of rules for prisoners using habeas corpus to attack state criminal judgments. For any issue not covered by those specialized rules, the civil procedure rules are usually applied.

Rule 15(a) sets a liberal standard for amending complaints. The text of the rule does not distinguish between amendments before judgment and after judgment, although the caption does. Rules 59(e) and 60(b) provide for motions in the trial court to set aside a judgment after it is entered. Rule 59(e) is relatively liberal, but it is only available in a tight 28-day window after the judgment is entered. Rule 60(b) is more strict but available for a longer time.

Is the standard for someone who wants to amend his complaint more than 28 days after judgment any less strict than the Rule 60(b) standard? No, says today’s decision:

Relief under Rule 60(b)(6) requires extraordinary circumstances. That standard does not become less demanding when a Rule 60(b)(6) movant also hopes to amend his complaint. Rather, a party seeking to reopen his case and re-plead must first satisfy Rule 60(b) on its own terms and obtain Rule 60(b) relief before Rule 15(a)’s liberal amendment standard can apply. Because the Second Circuit’s balancing approach conflates this order of operations and dilutes Rule 60(b)(6)’s well-established standard, we must reject it.

Here is what we said in our Rivers brief:

Even though Rule 15(a)(2) provides that “[t]he court should freely give leave [to amend] when justice so requires,” that is not the standard after judgment is entered in the district court. The rule was stated by the Seventh Circuit recently in Ewing v. 1645 W. Farragut LLC, 90 F. 4th 876 (2024). “It is well settled that after a final judgment, a plaintiff may amend a complaint under Rule 15(a) only with leave of court after a motion under Rule 59(e) or Rule 60(b) has been made and the judgment has been set aside or vacated.” Id., at 893 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted, emphasis in original).

A rule along these lines has been endorsed by every one of the federal circuits at some point, although the Second Circuit has some inconsistent decisions in recent years. Today’s rejection of the Second Circuit approach seriously undercuts Rivers’s argument.

Habeas corpus has the additional wrinkle that a Rule 60(b) motion that states a claim for relief from the criminal judgment is considered a successive petition, subject to the very strict limits in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The main point of our argument in Rivers is that once it is established that the habeas petitioner must meet Rule 60’s standards, not just Rule 15’s, the existing Supreme Court precedent of Gonzalez v. Crosby, 545 U. S. 524 (2005) answers the successive petition question.

We look forward to the Court’s decision in Rivers.