Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/552

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RUFO v. INMATES OF SUFFOLK COUNTY JAIL O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment

tors. As a result, an appellate court should examine primarily the method in which the District Court exercises its discretion, not the substantive outcome the District Court reaches. If the District Court takes into account the relevant considerations (all of which are not likely to suggest the same result) and accommodates them in a reasonable way, then the District Court’s judgment will not be an abuse of its discretion, regardless of whether an appellate court would have reached the same outcome in the first instance. Cf. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 411 U. S. 192, 200 (1973) (“In shaping equity decrees, the trial court is vested with broad discretionary power; appellate review is correspondingly narrow”). Our deference to the District Court’s exercise of its discretion is heightened where, as in this litigation, the District Court has effectively been overseeing a large public institution over a long period of time. Judge Keeton has been supervising the implementation of this decree since 1979; he has developed an understanding of the difficulties involved in constructing and managing a jail that an appellate court, even with the best possible briefing, could never hope to match. In reviewing the District Court’s judgment, we accordingly owe substantial deference to “the trial judge’s years of experience with the problem at hand.” Hutto v. Finney, 437 U. S. 678, 688 (1978). The Court devotes much of its attention to elaborating a “standard” for lower courts to apply in cases of this kind. Ante, at 378–384. I am not certain that the product of this effort—“A party seeking modification of a consent decree may meet its initial burden by showing a significant change either in factual conditions or in law,” ante, at 384—makes matters any clearer than the equally general language of Rule 60(b)(5). I think we would offer more guidance to the District Court here, and to the many other courts burdened with administering complex decrees like this one, if we would simply review the District Court’s exercise of its dis-