Federal Pleadings are Receiving Heightened Scrutiny Under New Standard

Publication Source: The Suffolk Lawyer

The dust is starting to clear from the United States Supreme Court’s decisions in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S.Ct. 1937 (2009), which altered the pleading standards in federal court. It is an opportune time, therefore, to assess how the federal judges in Central Islip have applied these precedent-altering decisions in determining motions to dismiss pleadings.

Conley’s “Retirement” One of the most widely-known and oft-cited cases in federal procedural jurisprudence is the Supreme Court’s decision in Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41 (1957), and its edict 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.” Id. at 45-46. Exactly 50 years after that monumental decision was rendered, the Supreme Court observed in Twombly that “Conley’s ‘no set of facts’ language has been questioned, criticized, and explained away long enough … and after puzzling the profession for 50 years, this famous observation has earned its retirement.” 550 U.S. at 562.

The Supreme Court chose to celebrate Conley’s retirement in Twombly in the context of an antitrust case. In Twombly, plaintiff consumers attempted to assert a class action against a group of major telecommunications providers, alleging that they conspired to foreclose competition to maintain inflated telephone and internet charges. The main weakness in the complaint was that plaintiffs failed to allege facts to establish that there was any actual agreement among the defendant telephone companies to restrain trade or commerce. Rather, plaintiffs sought to establish the existence of an agreement and, in-turn the conspiracy, by merely relying upon the telephone companies’ conscious “parallel behavior,” such as refraining from competing against each other and not seeking business opportunities in each other’s territories. In reversing the Second Circuit, the Supreme Court ruled that the complaint did not pass muster under Fed.R.Civ.Proc. 8, observing: “The need at the pleading stage for allegations plausibly suggesting (not merely consistent with) [an antitrust] agreement reflects the threshold requirement of Rule 8(a)(2) that the ‘plain statement’ possess enough heft to ‘sho[w] that the pleader is entitled to relief.’” 550 U.S. at 557.

Read the full article in the attached PDF.

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Kevin Schlosser is a Shareholder at Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, P.C., where he is Chair of the Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolution Department which has a full roster of available private judges from virtually all disciplines of law. Mr. Schlosser also authors the popular blog, “New York Fraud Claims,” which analyzes the latest developments concerning civil fraud claims under New York law.

The Suffolk Lawyer is an official publication of the Suffolk County Bar Association, www.scba.org