The United States Supreme Court yesterday cast aside a fifty-year-old precedent for testing the adequacy of a complaint

May 29, 2007

The United States Supreme Court yesterday cast aside a fifty-year-old precedent for testing the adequacy of a complaint. The Court’s decision in Bell Atlantic Corporation v. Twombly, __ S. Ct. __, No. 05-1126 (May 21, 2007), came in an antitrust case, but it will likely have important implications on all manner of civil cases. The Supreme Court expressly banished into "retirement" the Court’s own prior statement of law that has been taught to law students in civil procedure courses for decades: 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." Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 45-46 (1957). That formulation has long been considered to be the quintessential expression of "notice pleading" under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: the idea that a complaint is intended simply to give notice to the defendants of what a claim is about, and, as such, does not require a plaintiff to set forth facts supporting a claim in any detail.

As the Court noted in Bell Atlantic, the problem with the Conley formulation is that, taken literally, it would mean that "a wholly conclusory statement of claim would survive a motion to dismiss whenever the pleadings left open the possibility that a plaintiff might later establish some ‘set of [undisclosed] facts’ to support recovery." And so, for decades, this one sentence from Conley has been cited countless times by plaintiffs as the mainstay of briefs opposing motions to dismiss, as well as in many judicial decisions rejecting motions to dismiss.

But no more. By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court explicitly abandoned the Conley rule: "Conley’s ‘no set of facts’ language has been questioned, criticized, and explained away long enough . . . . [A]fter puzzling the profession for 50 years, this famous observation has earned its retirement."

The complaint in Bell Atlantic sought to state a claim by alleging facts that the Baby Bells had engaged in parallel conduct in their respective service areas to inhibit the growth of competitors. But the complaint did not allege any specific facts showing that the defendants had reached an agreement to refrain from competing against one another. That failure was fatal to the complaint, the Supreme Court held, because it was insufficient to allege merely the legal conclusion that there must have been such an agreement, or to allege merely facts (here, the parallel conduct) that may or may not reflect a prohibited agreement in restraint of trade.

In states, like Florida, for example, where the state rules are based upon the federal rules, this case may serve as a basis to insert the high court's reasoning into state civil jurisprudence.

Entire Opinion