Implausible Realities: Iqbal’s Entrenchment of Majority Group Skepticism Towards Discrimination Claims

By Ramzi Kassem.

In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, handed down on May 18, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Javaid Iqbal failed to plead sufficient facts to support the allegation that he had been arbitrarily and unconstitutionally classified by the federal government as a person “of high interest” and detained in a maximum security facility after September 11th, 2001 because of his race, religion, and national origin. In affirming dismissal of the complaint, the Court noted that the facts alleged did not “‘nudge[] [the plaintiffs’] claims’ of invidious discrimination ‘across the line from conceivable to plausible.’” Iqbal ostensibly extended to intent-based civil claims the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Bell Atlantic Corporation v. Twombly, mandating that pleadings in antitrust cases must allege enough facts to plausibly “sho[w] that the pleader is entitled to relief” under Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

To say that Iqbal modified the pleading standard in certain types of cases would be a dramatic understatement. The decision profoundly transformed the jurisprudential landscape, shifting the course of lawsuits nationwide. A cursory glance at the ruling’s rate of citation gives a measure of its sweeping impact. Based on a recent search, in the single year since it was decided, Iqbal has been cited six times by the Supreme Court, over 300 times by the courts of appeals, and more than 6,500 times by district courts. The pleading requirement set out in Iqbal has been extended beyond the Bivens claims at issue in that case to a number of different causes of action, including Section 1981 and Title VII. Its vast influence commands close attention, as does the fact that it arose out of—and dismissed—a discrimination case brought by a member of an unpopular minority group.
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