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Full-Text Articles in Law
Pleading With Congress To Resist The Urge To Overrule Twombly And Iqbal, Michael R. Huston
Pleading With Congress To Resist The Urge To Overrule Twombly And Iqbal, Michael R. Huston
Michigan Law Review
In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Supreme Court changed the rhetoric of the federal pleading system. Those decisions have been decried by members of the bar, scholars, and legislators as judicial activism and a rewriting of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Such criticism has led members of both houses of Congress to introduce legislation to overrule the decisions and return to some variation of the "notice pleading" regime that existed before Twombly. This Note argues that both of the current proposals to overrule Twombly and Iqbal should be rejected. Although the bills take different …
The Tao Of Pleading: Do Twombly And Iqbal Matter Empirically, Patricia W. Moore
The Tao Of Pleading: Do Twombly And Iqbal Matter Empirically, Patricia W. Moore
Faculty Articles
In 2007, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, sending “shockwaves” through the federal litigation bar. Seemingly without prior warning, the Court abrogated “the accepted rule that a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief”—the standard for deciding 12(b)(6) motions first stated fifty years earlier in Conley v. Gibson. To replace the old rule, the Court announced a new “plausibility” standard: that a complaint …
New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson
New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson
Michigan Law Review
Pleading in federal court has a new narrative. The old narrative was one of notice, with the goal of broad access to the civil justice system. New Pleading, after the landmark Supreme Court cases of Twombly and Iqbal, is focused on factual sufficiency, with the purpose of screening out meritless cases that otherwise might impose discovery costs on defendants. The problem with New Pleading is that factual insufficiency often is a poor proxy for meritlessness. Some plaintifs lack sufficient factual knowledge of the elements of their claims not because the claims lack merit but because the information they need is …