Twombly and Iqbal at the State Level (with Abby K. Wood)
This paper contributes to the empirical literature on pleading standards by studying the effect of Twombly and Iqbal at the state level. States account for the majority of civil litigation, yet they are understudied doctrinally and empirically. By examining pleading at the state level, we can leverage differences across space and time in a way that is impossible with studies at the federal level.
Using an array of principled empirical approaches, we find evidence that states that raised their pleading standards in the wake of Twombly and Iqbal experienced no decrease in filings, no evidence that plaintiffs changed how they wrote complaints, no evidence of an increase in motions to dismiss, and no increase in the grant rate on motions to dismiss. Until now, we simply did not know whether the existing literature at the federal level analyzed an outlier jurisdiction or whether pleading functions similarly in both state and federal courts. This paper fills that gap and lays the groundwork for future empirical research on national procedural uniformity and divergence.
Roger Michalski and Abby K. Wood, Twombly and Iqbal at the State Level, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Vol. 14, Issue 2, pp. 424-469, 2017.
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