Cite as: 513 U. S. 18 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
Philips Corp., 510 U. S. 27, 40 (1993) (Stevens, J., dissenting). Congress has prescribed a primary route, by appeal as of right and certiorari, through which parties may seek relief from the legal consequences of judicial judgments. To allow a party who steps off the statutory path to employ the secondary remedy of vacatur as a refined form of collateral attack on the judgment would—quite apart from any considerations of fairness to the parties—disturb the orderly operation of the federal judicial system. Munsingwear establishes that the public interest is best served by granting relief when the demands of "orderly procedure," 340 U. S., at 41, cannot be honored; we think conversely that the public interest requires those demands to be honored when they can.
Petitioner advances two arguments meant to justify vacatur on systemic grounds. The first is that appellate judgments in cases that we have consented to review by writ of certiorari are reversed more often than they are affirmed, are therefore suspect, and should be vacated as a sort of prophylactic against legal error. It seems to us inappropriate, however, to vacate mooted cases, in which we have no constitutional power to decide the merits, on the basis of assumptions about the merits. Second, petitioner suggests that "[v]acating a moot decision, and thereby leaving an issue . . . temporarily unresolved in a Circuit, can facilitate the ultimate resolution of the issue by encouraging its continued examination and debate." Brief for Petitioner 33. We have found, however, that debate among the courts of appeals sufficiently illuminates the questions that come before us for review. The value of additional intracircuit debate seems to us far outweighed by the benefits that flow to litigants and the public from the resolution of legal questions.
A final policy justification urged by petitioner is the facilitation of settlement, with the resulting economies for the federal courts. But while the availability of vacatur may facilitate settlement after the judgment under review has
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