Kemp v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that the word 'mistake' in a federal court rule governing requests to reopen final decisions covers a judge's own legal errors, not just factual mistakes by the parties.
The ruling resolves a long-running split among the federal appeals courts and means that anyone challenging a judge's legal error in a closed case must do so within one year — they cannot argue that a more open-ended timeline applies instead.
How it got here: A federal district court dismissed Kemp's post-conviction motion as untimely and later rejected his attempt to reopen that ruling; the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve a split among the federal appeals courts.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Dexter Kemp, a federal prisoner serving a 420-month sentence for drug and gun crimes, tried to reopen a court proceeding that had dismissed his challenge to his sentence as filed too late. He argued that the district judge had made a legal error about when his filing deadline started to run. The dispute turned on which court rule — one with a one-year deadline or one with a more flexible open-ended deadline — governed his attempt to reopen the case.
The question before the Court
When a federal judge makes a legal error in a final court decision, does the court rule that lets parties ask to reopen decisions within one year — rather than an open-ended timeline — apply?
The Court's answer
Yes — the word "mistake" in Rule 60(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure covers a judge's own errors of law, not just factual mix-ups by the parties. The Court reached this conclusion by examining how "mistake" was defined in ordinary and legal dictionaries when the rule was adopted and revised — both pointed to a meaning broad enough to include legal misjudgments. The Court also highlighted a telling change: the original 1938 rule said "his" mistake, meaning a party's mistake, so judges were excluded. When the 1946 revision dropped "his," it removed that limit entirely.
The Court refused to add restrictions the text does not contain. It rejected the government's position that only "obvious" legal errors qualify — nothing in the rule's language or history supports that limit, and it would require courts to make difficult judgment calls about how obvious a mistake was. It also rejected Kemp's argument that the surrounding words in the rule signal that "mistake" should be read narrowly. Because Kemp's motion alleged a legal error by the district court, it fell under Rule 60(b)(1) and its one-year deadline — making his motion, filed nearly two years after the challenged ruling, untimely.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
People who lose in federal court and later want to challenge a legal error in a final ruling now face a firm one-year deadline. They can no longer claim the more flexible open-ended rule applies. This most directly affects federal prisoners and civil litigants who missed the standard appeal window and are trying to reopen proceedings — their window is shorter and harder to extend than some courts had previously allowed.
What changes now
Kemp's challenge to his sentence remains dismissed as untimely. For all federal litigants going forward, the decision establishes a uniform rule: a party arguing that a judge made a legal error in a final decision must bring that challenge under Rule 60(b)(1) within one year. The ruling resolves the longstanding split among the courts of appeals, though the Court expressly left open the question of whether a judicial decision that later becomes erroneous due to a change in law also qualifies as a "mistake" under Rule 60(b)(1).
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly left open whether a judicial ruling that becomes erroneous only because the law changed after it was issued also qualifies as a "mistake" under Rule 60(b)(1). Rule 60(b)(6) remains available for extraordinary circumstances, including a change in controlling law, and the Court's ruling does not disturb prior cases recognizing that avenue.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor joined the majority but wrote separately to flag two limits on the ruling's reach. First, she emphasized that nothing in the Court's opinion casts doubt on the continued availability of Rule 60(b)(6) to reopen judgments in extraordinary circumstances, such as a subsequent change in controlling law — citing prior cases she read as preserving that path. Second, she noted that the decision does not alter or clarify the 'reasonable time' standard in Rule 60(c)(1), which governs all Rule 60(b) motions.
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch would have dismissed the case as improvidently granted, arguing it fails to meet the Court's usual standards for review and involves only a narrow, rarely arising scenario. He argued the policy question at the heart of the dispute — how to balance finality against error correction — is better resolved through the formal rulemaking process, where judges and practitioners can weigh competing interests. He also criticized the majority for adopting a position that neither party had advanced: that every judicial legal error, not just an obvious one, is open to collateral attack under Rule 60(b)(1), all on the basis of a pronoun deleted in 1946.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the ordinary meaning of 'mistake' as it was understood when Rule 60(b) was adopted in 1938 and revised in 1946. Dictionaries of the era defined 'mistake' broadly — as any 'misconception,' 'misunderstanding,' or 'fault in opinion or judgment' — and legal dictionaries explicitly included errors 'of law or fact.' Neither definition limited the term to factual errors or to mistakes by non-judicial actors.
- The Court found a decisive clue in the rule's own drafting history. The original 1938 version said 'his' mistake — referring to a party's mistake — which meant judges' errors were excluded by definition. The 1946 revision deleted the word 'his,' stripping out any restriction on whose mistakes could count. The Court treated this as a deliberate choice to expand the rule's reach to include judicial legal errors.
- The Court rejected the government's argument that Rule 60(b)(1) covers only 'obvious' legal errors. No dictionary from the relevant era suggests an 'obviousness' limit, the government did not tie the concept to the rule's text or history, and requiring courts to judge how obvious a mistake was would create administrability problems with no textual basis.
- The Court also rejected Kemp's argument that the words surrounding 'mistake' in the rule — 'inadvertence,' 'surprise,' and 'excusable neglect' — signal that 'mistake' should be limited to non-legal, non-judicial errors. Courts have long applied 'excusable neglect' to situations involving legal misunderstanding, and they have a history of granting relief for 'judicial inadvertence' as well, so those neighboring terms do not support a narrowing reading.
- Because Kemp's Rule 60(b) motion alleged that the district court made a legal error in calculating when his filing deadline began, it fell squarely within Rule 60(b)(1) — which has a one-year limit — rather than the open-ended Rule 60(b)(6). His motion, filed nearly two years after the ruling he was challenging, was therefore untimely under Rule 60(c)(1).