Constitutional Law Commons^™

Ashcroft V. Iqbal Crashes Rule 8 Pleading Standards On To Unconstitutional Shores, Kenneth S. Klein

Faculty Scholarship

Since the early nineteenth century, the interpretation of the Seventh Amendment preservation of the right to a civil trial by jury has remained static and become increasingly anachronistic. Over the same period of time, the evolution of modern civil procedure pleading standards has been on a collision course with that interpretation. The penultimate 2007 Supreme Court opinion in this field, Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, raised the specter of an impending impasse between pleading standards and the Seventh Amendment. The 2009 opinion in Ashcroft v. Iqbal is the point of impact. While the Iqbal opinion fails to even acknowledge …