Rule 8 and Rule 12(b)(6)

Sufficiency of the Complaint

Rule 8 and Rule 12(b)(6)

Rule 8(a)(2) asks little of a complaint: “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.”¹ The Supreme Court has read that language at face value. A plaintiff need not set out in detail the facts behind the claim; the complaint must give the defendant “fair notice of what the plaintiff’s claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.”² Whether a particular complaint does even that much is tested at the outset, by a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6).

A Rule 12(b)(6) motion “tests the legal sufficiency of a claim,” and a complaint can fail the test in two ways. It may rest on no cognizable legal theory, or it may allege too few facts under a theory the law does recognize.³ Detailed factual allegations are not required, but the complaint must include enough facts to “state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.”⁴ Later sections develop that plausibility requirement. This section explains the motion itself and the lenient baseline the plausibility cases built on.

The motion works by assumption. Its core assertion is that even if the plaintiff proves every fact alleged, governing substantive law grants no relief.⁵ In that respect Rule 12(b)(6) carries forward the common-law demurrer, which also assumed the pleaded facts to be true.⁶ Because the defendant has not yet answered, the complaint is the only account of events before the judge, and the court takes its factual allegations as true.⁷ The defendant therefore cannot use the motion to add facts or to contest the plaintiff’s. The motion challenges only the legal sufficiency of the facts the plaintiff has alleged.⁸

The court reads the complaint generously in one respect and skeptically in another. It resolves ambiguities in the pleading in the plaintiff’s favor, and if it can reasonably infer that the complaint states a valid cause of action, it must deny the motion.⁹ But the assumption of truth does not reach allegations that are no more than conclusions. A court may begin by identifying those and setting them aside, then ask whether the remaining well-pleaded facts, taken as true, plausibly give rise to an entitlement to relief. Legal conclusions can supply a complaint’s framework, but factual allegations must support them.¹⁰ Later sections work through that analysis.

Dismissal follows when the facts as pleaded cannot support recovery under any legal theory. If the plaintiff’s own allegations show that every cause of action is time-barred, for example, the court will dismiss.¹¹ The same challenge may be raised after the answer by a Rule 12(c) motion for judgment on the pleadings, the functional equivalent of the 12(b)(6) motion made later in the case. Either party may make it, and the movant must show that on the face of the pleadings no material issue of fact remains and that it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.¹² A defense supports that result only if it is conclusive, meaning that no factual showing by the plaintiff could overcome it. Self-defense, for instance, does not qualify, because the plaintiff may be able to show that the defendant used excessive force.¹³

A ruling on the motion is seldom fatal to either party. The plaintiff almost always gets the chance to amend a dismissed complaint,¹⁴ and a defendant whose motion fails may keep defending the claim at trial.¹⁵ The challenge to legal sufficiency is also never waived, which reflects the motion’s purpose of ridding the system of spurious complaints.¹⁶ A complaint that is merely unclear draws a different motion. If it is so vague or ambiguous that the defendant cannot reasonably prepare a response, Rule 12(e) permits a motion for a more definite statement, and Rule 12(f) permits a motion to strike redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous material.¹⁷

The first complaint loses because accepting every pleaded fact still yields no right to relief, and the defect is one of law. The second survives because nothing in it rules out liability, and the court reads the pleading in the plaintiff’s favor.¹⁸ A complaint that is general survives; a complaint whose facts, even if true, give no right to relief does not.

Rule 8 is this spare because it was written to escape an older system. Under code pleading, a bare allegation that the defendant “negligently drove” a car into the plaintiff was the kind of statement that would have been called a “conclusion of law.”¹⁹ Rule 8 was directly responsive to the difficulty that labeling created, and its drafters intentionally avoided any reference to “facts,” “evidence,” or “conclusions.”²⁰

The Rules’ own sample forms show the result. Form 9, a complaint for negligence, alleged only that on June 1, 1936, on Boylston Street in Boston, the defendant negligently drove a motor vehicle against the plaintiff, who was then crossing the street. It then described the injuries and demanded judgment.²¹ The Rules describe their forms as sufficient and as “intended to indicate the simplicity and brevity of statement which the rules contemplate.”²²

With a pleading standard that lenient, the Supreme Court historically cautioned that dismissal for failure to state a claim is a drastic measure, reserved for the most frivolous cases.²³ The Court stated that caution in Conley v. Gibson, the decision on which notice pleading rested.

Judges may not raise the bar on their own. In Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, the Fifth Circuit had applied a “heightened pleading standard” to § 1983 claims against municipalities. The Supreme Court found it “impossible to square” with the “liberal system of ‘notice pleading’ set up by the Federal Rules.”²⁴ The Rules themselves demand particularity in two instances, fraud and mistake,²⁵ and claims against municipalities are not among them. The Court allowed that Rules 8 and 9 might be rewritten to subject such claims to Rule 9(b), but that result “must be obtained by the process of amending the Federal Rules, and not by judicial interpretation.” In the meantime, courts and litigants must rely on summary judgment and control of discovery to weed out unmeritorious claims sooner rather than later.²⁶

The sections that follow turn to Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, where the plausibility requirement quoted above took shape, and to the cases that apply it.