The U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. Bancorp Mortgage Company v. Bonner Mall Partnership was presented with the issue of whether federal appellate courts should vacate civil judgments of lower courts in cases that are settled after an appeal is filed or certiorari is sought. The Court held that mootness of a decision due to settlement of the dispute by the parties does not justify, as a routine matter, vacatur of the judgment under review even if the parties' own settlement agreement provides for vacatur of the judgment. The Court added that the decision to vacate a judgment was an equitable one and therefore, there may be situations where an appellate court would vacate a lower court judgment.

In reaching its decision, one of the factors that the Court considered was the effect of vacatur on the public. The Court citing an earlier precedent stated that "judicial precedents are presumptively correct and valuable to the legal community as a whole. They are not merely the property of private litigants and should stand unless a court concluded that the public interest would be served by a vacatur."