The New Pleading Standard in Federal Court Requires Greater Factual Content

The United States Supreme Court is your new friend in seeking dismissal in federal district court.  Its Iqbal v. Ashcroft has been heralded as the “most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts.”  Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) has filed legislation to force a reversal of Iqbal.  The uproar among some counsel is in full swing.

What’s the big deal, you ask?  Well, the Court reiterated and extended in Iqbal its holding from Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, the shift in the pleading standard from simple “notice pleading” to “facial plausibility,” which provides that in order to “survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to ‘state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.’”

The Iqbal Court disclosed that a “claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.”  The plausibility standard “asks for more than a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully.”  Moreover, “[w]here a complaint pleads facts that are ‘merely consistent with’ a defendant’s liability, it ‘stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of ‘entitlement to relief.’”

One question that remained following Twombly was whether the ruling was intended to apply beyond the antitrust arena.  The Court expressly rejected this argument.  The Court applied Twombly and identified the two “working principles” found in Twombly: 1) “that a court must accept as true all of the allegations contained in a complaint is inapplicable to legal conclusions. Threadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere conclusory statements, do not suffice.”  And 2) only a complaint that states a plausible claim for relief survives a motion to dismiss.  To determine facial plausibility, the district court judge must “draw on its judicial experience and common sense,” however, “where the well-pleaded facts do not permit the court to infer more than the mere possibility of misconduct, the complaint has alleged—but it has not “show[n]”—“that the pleader is entitled to relief.”

The Court rejected an assertion that under Rule 9, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, “general allegations,” i.e., conclusory allegations, are sufficient to assert a claim of discriminatory intent.  The Court held that “the Federal Rules do not require courts to credit a complaint’s conclusory statements without reference to its factual context.”  Moreover, the Court found that “Rule 8 does not empower respondent to plead the bare elements of his cause of action,affix the label ‘general allegation,’ and expect his complaint to survive a motion to dismiss.”

There has been no Utah state court appellate decision to cite either Twombly or Iqbal, however, you should take advantage of them state court because “[i]nterpretations of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are persuasive where the Utah Rules of Civil Procedure are ‘substantially similar’ to the federal rules.”  Tucker v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 2002 UT 54, ¶ 7 n. 2, 53 P.3d 947 (citation omitted).  Moreover, the compiler’s notes to Utah’s Rule 8 admits that the Federal and State Rule 8 are “substantially the same” and the courts, therefore, “freely refer to authorities which have interpreted the federal rule.”  Gold Standard, Inc. v. American Barrick Res. Corp., 805 P.2d 164, 168 (Utah 1990).

Let us know if you have any success applying the Iqbal “facial plausibility” standard in state court.