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The Trouble With Twombly: A Proposed Pleading Standard For Employment Discrimination Cases, Joseph A. Seiner

Joseph A. Seiner

Amorphous. This is how the Supreme Court’s recent pleading paradigm has been appropriately described. In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, the Supreme Court abandoned the well-known pleading standard it had adopted fifty years earlier in Conley v. Gibson that a complaint should be dismissed only where there is no set of facts that could entitle the plaintiff to relief. In its place, the Court adopted a new rule that the pleadings must set forth sufficient facts to state a plausible claim. Though Twombly arose in the context of an antitrust case, its holding has already been extended by the lower …