620
Opinion of the Court
interests inadequately represented. See 83 F. 3d, at 630- 631. The Third Circuit's close inspection of the settlement in that regard was altogether proper.
Confronted with a request for settlement-only class certification, a district court need not inquire whether the case, if tried, would present intractable management problems, see Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 23(b)(3)(D), for the proposal is that there be no trial. But other specifications of the Rule— those designed to protect absentees by blocking unwar-ranted or overbroad class definitions—demand undiluted, even heightened, attention in the settlement context. Such attention is of vital importance, for a court asked to certify a settlement class will lack the opportunity, present when a case is litigated, to adjust the class, informed by the proceedings as they unfold. See Rule 23(c), (d).16
And, of overriding importance, courts must be mindful that the Rule as now composed sets the requirements they are bound to enforce. Federal Rules take effect after an extensive deliberative process involving many reviewers: a Rules Advisory Committee, public commenters, the Judicial Conference, this Court, the Congress. See 28 U. S. C. §§ 2073, 2074. The text of a rule thus proposed and reviewed limits judicial inventiveness. Courts are not free to amend a rule outside the process Congress ordered, a process properly tuned to the instruction that rules of procedure "shall not abridge . . . any substantive right." § 2072(b).
Rule 23(e), on settlement of class actions, reads in its entirety: "A class action shall not be dismissed or compromised
16 Portions of the opinion dissenting in part appear to assume that settlement counts only one way—in favor of certification. See post, at 629, 630, 641. But see post, at 635. To the extent that is the dissent's meaning, we disagree. Settlement, though a relevant factor, does not inevitably signal that class-action certification should be granted more readily than it would be were the case to be litigated. For reasons the Third Circuit aired, see 83 F. 3d 610, 626-635 (1996), proposed settlement classes sometimes warrant more, not less, caution on the question of certification.
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