The Lost Story of Iqbal

Every first-year law student reads Ashcroft v. Iqbal , 1 the 2009 Supreme Court decision that transformed pleading standards across civil litigation. Now an established part of the civil procedure canon, the 5–4 decision significantly eased the standard for dismissing complaints for failure to state a claim, upending the liberal pleading regime that had marked federal litigation for half a century. The old standard judged the factual sufficiency of complaints only according to whether they gave defendants fair notice of the basis for the plaintiff’s case, rather than screening cases on their merits. 2 Iqbal required instead that a plaintiff set out facts to persuade a judge that her claim was “plausible.” The new pleading standard attracted enormous attention from lawyers, legal scholars, and lower courts. Indeed, by 2015, the decision had already become one of the five most cited Supreme Court decisions of all time. 3