Academic

My "Princess Bride" article on SSRN

By Tung Yin

I know "The Princess Bride" has a reputation for being a "chick flick," but I think it's one of the best movies ever made (and a terrific novel, too).  I like it so much that I used one of its classic lines as the central image for my short essay on Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which is part of a paper symposium in the Lewis & Clark Law Review.

It's titled "I Do Not Think [Implausible] Means What You Think It Means: Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Judicial Vouching"; the abstract reads:

The Supreme Court's use of a "plausibility" standard to order the dismissal of a plaintiff's civil rights action in Ashcroft v. Iqbal has been criticized on a variety of grounds. In this Article, I argue that even if Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure does and should contain such a plausibility standard, the application of that standard to Iqbal's allegations is utterly unpersuasive. The Court could have used qualified immunity to grant relief to the government-official defendants instead of declaring implausible Iqbal's allegation that he was subjected to harsh detention conditions due to his being Pakistani and Muslim. There are, in the pages of the federal reporters, decisions in which trial and appellate courts have sustained civil rights complaints against motions to dismiss. Those complaints, like Iqbal's, alleged conspiracies to target persons based on race or other such characteristics. Therefore, the Court's decision in Iqbal can, in essence, only be understood as vouching improperly that these defendants would not have acted in the ways alleged.

Inconceivable!

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on February 26, 2010 (boomark / email).