Tattersalls, Ltd. v. Dehaven

• Decision Date: 21 March 2014
• Docket Number: No. 12–56037.,12–56037.
• Parties: TATTERSALLS, LTD., Incorporated in England, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Jeffrey DeHAVEN, Defendant–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

745 F.3d 1294

TATTERSALLS, LTD., Incorporated in England, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.Jeffrey DeHAVEN, Defendant–Appellant.

No. 12–56037.

United States Court of Appeals,Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted Feb. 7, 2014.

Filed March 21, 2014.

Raymond E. Lee, Michael J. Chilleen, Roger Scott (argued), Greenberg Traurig, LLP, Irvine, CA, for Defendant–Appellant.

Diana Courteau (argued), Courteau & Associates, El Segundo, CA, for Plaintiff–Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California, S. James Otero, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. 2:11–cv–06311–SJO–SH.

Before: MARY M. SCHROEDER and RICHARD R. CLIFTON, Circuit Judges, and BRIAN M. COGAN, District Judge.^*

OPINION

CLIFTON, Circuit Judge:

Defendant-appellant Jeffrey DeHaven appeals the district court's grant of a Rule 60(a) motion in favor of plaintiff-appellee Tattersalls, Ltd., an auctioneer. DeHaven bought and took possession of a horse from Tattersalls but did not pay for it. When Tattersalls sued, the district court granted title and right of possession of the horse to Tattersalls. The court did not award damages for the reduction in the horse's value while she was held by DeHaven but instructed Tattersalls to move to amend the judgment under Rule 59(e), Fed.R.Civ.P., when it knew the amount of the damages. The district court overlooked the 28–day deadline for motions under Rule 59(e), however. After the deadline expired, the court held that it was permitted to correct the judgment under Rule 60(a), Fed.R.Civ.P., which does not have a time limit, to award monetary damages. We hold that, because the district court always intended to grant Tattersalls damages, this use of Rule 60(a) was proper, and we affirm.

I. Background

Tattersalls, Ltd., the plaintiff-appellee, is an English auctioneer of thoroughbred horses. The defendant-appellant, Jeffrey DeHaven, bought a horse, Singapore Lilly, from Tattersalls in November 2010 for $357,210 (210,000 guineas). DeHaven shipped the horse to the United States and entered her into races but did not pay for her.

Tattersalls filed a complaint to recover the horse, the difference between her purchase price and the resale value, and other damages. DeHaven did not respond to the complaint, and the court entered a default judgment against DeHaven on September 30, 2011. The court noted that Tattersalls had a meritorious claim to title of the horse but that the amount of damages was uncertain. As the court observed, “Singapore Lilly has aged almost a full year since Defendant agreed to purchase her, so she is likely worth less now than when Plaintiff originally sold her to Defendant.” Therefore, the court held, “[t]he proper measure of contract damages, in light of the fact that Plaintiff is also entitled to regain title to the horse, is the amount of the depreciation in the horse's value between the previous sale at auction and the present.”

The court declined to award Tattersalls both the full purchase price and title to the horse, as Tattersalls had requested, because that would permit Tattersalls a double recovery. Even if Tattersalls promised to refund the horse's sale price to DeHaven, the company might not sell her speedily, allowing her to depreciate further, and it might also sell her at less than a fair market price. But the court noted that at that time it had no “credible evidence” of the horse's current worth. The court attempted to solve these problems by entering judgment granting title, ownership, and right of possession to Tattersalls so the company could try to resell the horse at the next available auction on November 6, 2011. It seems that the court wanted Tattersalls to have the opportunity to auction the horse before it assessed damages because the alternative—an expert appraisal of the horse's value—could only be an approximation of the current market value. Because Tattersalls could not sell the horse unless it was registered as the owner, the court needed to grant it title to permit it to be auctioned.¹

The court addressed the damages question by “find[ing] that Singapore Lilly has not depreciated in value” and entering a judgment that would “not include any money damages for the depreciation of Singapore Lilly's value,” but instructing Tattersalls to move to amend the judgment later under Rule 59(e), Fed.R.Civ.P., to supply evidence of the horse's lost value. The deadline that the court set for the Rule 59(e) motion was November 21, 52 days after the date of its judgment and two weeks after the upcoming auction. The court gave Tattersalls the option of submitting expert testimony as to the horse's value if she failed to sell at the auction.

DeHaven noticed an appeal against the default judgment. On November 18, 2011, Tattersalls filed a motion with the district court to continue the November 21 deadline. Tattersalls had not been able to sell the horse at the November 6 auction, because the Jockey Club would not amend Singapore Lilly's registration papers unless there was a nonappealable judgment, and DeHaven's appeal was pending. DeHaven opposed the motion because Rule 59(e) provides that “[a] motion to alter or amend a judgment must be filed no later than 28 days after the entry of the judgment.”Judgment had been entered on September 30, more than 28 days before.²

In an order entered November 22, 2011, the court acknowledged that DeHaven was correct and that it was too late for Tattersalls to move to amend under Rule 59(e). The court ruled, however, that Tattersalls would be able to file a motion to correct the judgment under Rule 60(a) instead. The court, quoting Robi v. Five Platters, Inc., 918 F.2d 1439, 1445 (9th Cir.1990), noted that “[a] district court judge may properly invoke Rule 60(a) to make a judgment reflect the actual intentions and necessary implications of the court's decision,” and emphasized that it had “intended all along to permit Plaintiff to recover the depreciation in the horse's value.”

Tattersalls sought to remand the case from this court, and also requested an indicative ruling from the district court under Rule 62. 1, Fed.R.Civ.P., as to how it would decide the Rule 60(a) motion. The court issued an order on February 1, 2012, indicating that it would grant the Rule 60(a) motion and repeated that it “clearly signaled its intent on September 30, 2011, that it wished to grant Plaintiff damages to compensate it for the depreciation in Singapore Lilly's value, but wanted to do so on the basis of either evidence of her resale price or expert evidence regarding depreciation.”

After this court remanded the case, the district court entered an order granting Tattersalls' Rule 60(a) motion on May 4, 2012. The court accepted Tattersalls' uncontested expert testimony that Singapore Lilly was worth $75,000 on September 30, 2011, and therefore granted Tattersalls $282,210 in damages for the depreciation in value, in addition to title, ownership, and right of possession of the horse.

DeHaven appeals, arguing that the court abused its discretion in correcting the judgment so as to award depreciation damages.

II. Discussion

We review a district court's decision to grant relief under Rule 60(a) for abuse of discretion. Garamendi v. Henin, 683 F.3d 1069, 1077 (9th Cir.2012). A legal error is an abuse of discretion. Id.

A. Rule 60(a)

Under Rule 60(a), a court “may correct a clerical mistake or a mistake arising from oversight or omission whenever one is found in a judgment, order, or other part of the record.” In determining whether a mistake may be corrected under Rule 60(a), “our circuit focuses on what the court originally intended to do.” Blanton v. Anzalone, 813 F.2d 1574, 1577 (9th Cir.1987). Thus, “[t]he basic distinction between ‘clerical mistakes' and mistakes that cannot be corrected pursuant to Rule 60(a) is that the former consist of ‘blunders in execution’ whereas the latter consist of instances where the court changes its mind.” Id. n. 2.

The quintessential “clerical” errors are where the court errs in transcribing the judgment or makes a computational mistake. 12–60 Moore's Federal Practice § 60.11[1][b]; see Garamendi, 683 F.3d at 1078, 1080. But Rule 60(a) covers more than those situations. For example, in In re Jee, 799 F.2d 532 (9th Cir.1986), we held that a bankruptcy court did not clearly err in using Rule 60(a) to amend a prior dismissal order where the record and the recollection of the judge who entered the order indicated that the dismissal was intendedto be without prejudice. In Jones & Guerrero Co. v. Sealift Pacific, 650 F.2d 1072 (9th Cir.1981), we permitted the district court to use Rule 60(a) to correct a blanket order dismissing twenty-two diversity cases, where the court intended to remand one of those cases—the only one not originally filed in federal court—to territorial court. And in Robi, 918 F.2d at 1444–46, we permitted a court to use Rule 60(a) to clarify that it intended to cancel three trademarks, not just the one explicitly mentioned in the judgment.

We recapitulated our view regarding the permissible uses of Rule 60(a) in Garamendi v. Henin. There, we held that it was permissible for a court to use Rule 60(a) to clarify a judgment that could not be domesticated in a foreign country because its reasoning was not sufficiently detailed. 683 F.3d at 1080–81. Surveying our and other courts' decisions relating to the allowable uses of Rule 60(a), we concluded that the Rule “allows a court to clarify a judgment in order to correct a failure to memorialize part of its decision, to reflect the necessary implications of the original order, to ensure that the court's purpose is fully implemented, or to permit enforcement.” Id. at 1079 (internal quotation marks omitted). The “touchstone” of Rule 60(a) in all these cases is “fidelity to the intent behind the original judgment.” Id. at 1078.

B. The district court's use of Rule 60(a) was proper

Relying on Garamendi, we hold that the district court's use of Rule...