Law Commons^™

Iqbal, Twombly, And The Lessons Of The Celotex Trilogy, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

This Essay compares the Twombly/Iqbal line of cases to the Celotex trilogy and suggests that developments since the latter offer lessons for the former. Some of the comparisons are obvious: decreased access and increased judicial discretion. However, one important similarity has not been well understood: that the driving force in both contexts has been the lower courts rather than the Supreme Court. Further, while we can expect additional access barriers to be erected in the future, our focus should be on lower courts, rather than other institutional players, as the likely source of those barriers.

Pleading And Access To Civil Procedure: Historical And Comparative Reflections On Iqbal, A Day In Court And A Decision According To Law, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

The Iqbal decision confirms the breakdown of contemporary American civil procedure. We know what civil procedure should do, and we know that our civil procedure is not doing it. Civil procedure should facilitate determining rights according to law. It should help courts and parties apply law to facts accurately, fairly, expeditiously and efficiently. This article reflects on three historic American system failures and reports a foreign success story.

Pleadings can help courts do what we know courts should do: decide case on the merits, accurately, fairly, expeditiously and efficiently. Pleadings facilitate a day in court when focused on deciding according …

Jurisdictional Discovery In United States Federal Courts, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

The article begins with a discussion of the historical development and jurisprudential bases for jurisdictional discovery, then analyzes the two major structural problems with the device, namely (1) the lack of any identifiable standard regarding when jurisdictional discovery will be ordered and (2) the absence of any understanding about the proper scope of such discovery. Next, the article describes the root causes of these structural inadequacies and proposes several ways to address the root concerns, relying on a new line of Supreme Court precedent (including Ashcroft v. Iqbal) as well as analogies to other common law jurisdictions. The paper concludes …

I Could Have Been A Contender: Summary Jury Trial As A Means To Overcome Iqbal's Negative Effects Upon Pre-Litigation Communication, Negotiation And Early, Consensual Dispute Resolution, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

With its recent decisions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court may be intentionally or unintentionally “throwing the fight,” at least in the legal contests between many civil rights claimants and institutional defendants. The most obvious feared effect is reduction of civil rights claimants’ access to the expressive and coercive power of the courts. Less obviously, the Supreme Court may be effectively undermining institutions’ motivation to negotiate, mediate - or even communicate with and listen to - such claimants before they initiate legal action. Thus, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have the potential to deprive …

Summary Judgment And The Influence Of Federal Rulemaking (Foreword To Symposium: The Future Of Summary Judgment), Bernadette Bollas Genetin

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This essay provides an overview of symposium articles on The Future of Summary Judgment, which were submitted in connection with the Section on Litigation’s program on summary judgment at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. Contributions to the symposium by Professors Edward Brunet, Stephen Burbank, Jeffrey Cooper, Steven Gensler, and Linda Mullenix, explore issues regarding (1) amendments to Federal Rule 56 that are set to take effect on December 1, 2010; (2) emerging safeguards to prevent improvident grant of summary judgment; (3) the potential of summary judgment to impact interrelated aspects of the pretrial process, …

I Could Have Been A Contender: Summary Jury Trial As A Means To Overcome Iqbal's Negative Effects Upon Pre-Litigation Communication, Negotiation And Early, Consensual Dispute Resolution, Nancy A. Welsh

Journal Articles

With its recent decisions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court may be intentionally or unintentionally “throwing the fight,” at least in the legal contests between many civil rights claimants and institutional defendants. The most obvious feared effect is reduction of civil rights claimants’ access to the expressive and coercive power of the courts. Less obviously, the Supreme Court may be effectively undermining institutions’ motivation to negotiate, mediate - or even communicate with and listen to - such claimants before they initiate legal action. Thus, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have the potential to deprive …

The Supreme Court's Legislative Agenda To Free Government From Accountability For Constitutional Deprivations, Gary S. Gildin

Journal Articles

In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, the Supreme Court adopted a new standard of factual particularity a plaintiff must meet to satisfy the requirement of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2) that a complaint plead a “short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Court made clear that the Twombly pleading standard extended to civil actions seeking redress for deprivation of constitutional rights in particular, and universally to all Complaints filed in federal court. Commentators have debated whether after Iqbal, victims of constitutional wrongdoing will be able to …

Interrogating Iqbal: Intent, Inertia, And (A Lack Of) Imagination, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Court reaffirmed the long-standing equal protection doctrine that government actors can only be held liable for discriminatory conduct when they purposefully rely on a forbidden characteristic, such as race or gender, in promulgating policy; to simply know that minorities and women will be adversely affected by the law does not deny these groups equal protection under the law. This Essay interrogates this doctrine by taking a closer look at Iqbal and Feeney, the thirty-year-old precedent the majority cited as the source of its antidiscrimination standard. Because Feeney was cited in neither of the …

Front Loading And Heavy Lifting: How Pre-Dismissal Discovery Can Address The Detrimental Effect Of Iqbal On Civil Rights Cases, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

Although the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are trans-substantive, they have a greater detrimental effect on certain substantive claims. In particular, the Supreme Court’s recent interpretation of Rule 8(a)(2)’s pleading requirement and Rule 12(b)(6)’s dismissal criteria - in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal - sets forth a plausibility pleading standard which makes it more difficult for potentially meritorious civil rights claims alleging intentional discrimination to survive dismissal. Such claims are more vulnerable to dismissal because: plaintiffs alleging intentional discrimination often plead facts consistent with both legal and illegal conduct; discriminatory intent is often difficult, if not impossible, …

The Pleading Problem In Antitrust Cases And Beyond, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In its Twombly decision the Supreme Court held that an antitrust complaint failed because its allegations did not include enough “factual matter” to justify proceeding to discovery. Two years later the Court extended this new pleading standard to federal complaints generally. Twombly’s broad language has led to a broad rewriting of federal pleading doctrine.

Naked market division conspiracies such as the one pled in Twombly must be kept secret because antitrust enforcers will prosecute them when they are detected. This inherent secrecy, which the Supreme Court did not discuss, has dire consequences for pleading if too much factual specificity …