Cite as: 521 U. S. 567 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
that was joined later, or an intervenor—could preclude other parties from settling their own disputes." Firefighters v. Cleveland, 478 U. S. 501, 528-529 (1986).6 While appellant was entitled to present evidence and have his objections heard at the hearing to consider approval of the agreement, he "does not have power to block the decree merely by withholding [his] consent." Id., at 529; cf. 7B C. Wright, A. Miller, & M. Kane, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1797.1, p. 412 (2d ed. 1986) (fact of opposition does not necessitate disapproval of class-action settlement under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23). While a settlement agreement subject to court approval in a nonclass action may not impose duties or obligations on an unconsenting party or "dispose" of his claims, see Firefighters, supra, at 529, the agreement here did none of those things. It disposed of appellant's claim not in the forbidden sense of cutting him off from a remedy to which he was entitled, but only in the legitimate sense of granting him an element of the very relief he had sought. As a remedy for what appellant claimed to be an unconstitutional plan he had requested the elimination of that plan, and the settlement and decree gave him that relief. To afford him a right to the formality of a decree in addition to the substance of the relief sought would be to allow a sore winner to obscure the point of the suit. In most civil litigation, and in this suit in particular, "the judicial decree is not the end but the means. At the end of the rainbow lies not a judgment, but some action (or cessation of action) by the defendant that the judgment produces . . . . The real value of the judicial pronouncement—what makes it a proper judi-6 Notwithstanding the dissent's claim, see post, at 584, nothing in Fire-fighters limits its rule to remedial consent decrees that follow an adjudication of liability. To the contrary, the holding in Firefighters was expressly based on the principle that "it is the parties' agreement that serves as the source of the court's authority to enter any [consent] judgment at all," 478 U. S., at 522, and our opinion in that case makes no reference to any findings of liability.
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