Notice pleading is the dominant form of pleading used in the
United States today. In 1938, the
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were adopted. One goal of these rules was to relax the strict rules of
code pleading. This is considered a special pleading rule. The purpose of this rule is to help prevent a person from abusing the judicial process to
defame another without spelling out the specific circumstances surrounding the alleged fraud. Additional special pleading rules are set out in Rule 9 of the
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The leniency of the modern notice pleading system sometimes resulted in poorly-drafted
complaints with vaguely phrased, incoherent and conclusory
allegations. The
Supreme Court eventually responded in 2007 with a decision in
Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, and again in 2009 with a decision in
Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which together imposed new standards for specificity and "plausibility" in pleadings.
Iqbal reaffirmed and broadened
Twombly's ruling that a court need not accept a "legal conclusion couched as a factual allegation" or "naked assertions devoid of further factual enhancement". In
Twombly and
Iqbal, the U.S. Supreme Court sought to clarify the deceptively simple mandate of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2), which states that a "pleading that states a claim for relief must contain...a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitle to relief[.]" The Court interpreted
Rule 8(a)(2) in
Twombly to mean that a complaint must contain sufficient factual allegations to allow a
district court to find that the claim is plausible. The
Twombly court criticized the modern notice pleading standard derived from the landmark 1957
Conley v. Gibson decision, which had ruled that a complaint should not be dismissed at the pleading stage, "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". It is still not clear whether
Iqbal will reduce federal court caseloads by allowing frivolous or weak lawsuits to be thrown out at the pleading stage, prior to the commencement of potentially expensive discovery. The
Twombly and
Iqbal decisions (often referred to collectively as
Twiqbal) have the potential of denying plaintiffs with meritorious claims their day in court by raising insurmountable hurdles at the pleading stage. ==References==