This entry may be of some interest to people who draft complaints for filing in federal district courts (perhaps state courts as well), but will be of no interest whatsoever to anyone else. You’ve been warned.
You won’t have to travel far on the intarwebs to find someone who thinks that the May 2007 Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly is no big deal. I disagree, and so does this guy.
But by far and away the most interesting analysis I’ve seen to date comes from Professor Suja Thomas of the University of Cincinnati School of Law. In this article Prof. Thomas argues that Twombly raises a pretty significant constitutional issue, namely whether the relaxed standards for getting a complaint dismissed right out of the gate violate the Seventh Amendment’s guarantee of the right to trial by jury in civil cases. The article is a must-read for all civil procedure geeks, and a pretty-goddamn-close-to-must-read for federal court practitioners. The perfesser’s arguments could very well come in handy the next time a 12(b)(6) motion lands on your desk in a federal court case.
