The Heightened Pleading Standard of Twombly Appliesto All Federal Civil Claims
The Supreme Court's decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal clarifies that the pleading standard articulated two years in earlier in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly applies to all federal civil claims. In Twombly, the Court changed the long standing practice by federal district courts to interpret the notice pleading standard of Rule 8 of the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure as requiring no more than some skeletal allegation of an antitrust conspiracy; instead the Court required that the factual allegations be sufficient to make it plausible that the parallel conduct by the competitors is the result of a conspiracy as opposed to market competition. In Iqbal, the Court clarified that the same plausibility standard applies to all federal civil claims.