Evolution of the Requirements for the Content of the Statement of Claim Under the Increased Caseload Pressure on the Judicial System of the United States

The aim of the study is to trace the evolution of the "standards" of pleading in the US civil procedure, namely the requirements for the content of the statement of claim under the pressure of caseload. The requirements for the content of the statement of claim inevitably affect the access to justice in general. The rules for filing a lawsuit in courts of law and in equity courts in England, then in the United States in the old days were extremely complex, and failures to comply with the rules often led to the dismissal of quite reasonable claims. With the Field Code of 1848, fact pleading (code pleading) appeared in the USA; it was supposed to simplify the requirements for the content of the statement of claim. However, the requirement to plead only ultimate facts in the statement of claim also made it difficult to get legal defense in the end. The FRCP of 1938 drastically simplified the requirements for the lawsuit; however, the liberalization of the requirements for the lawsuit opened up a wider path for a significant rise in the number of filings to the courts and served as one of the reasons for the overload, the crisis of the US judicial system in the second half of the twentieth century, which also manifested itself in the increasing cost and delay of judicial proceedings (especially at discovery). The litigation crisis strongly influenced the courts' practice in applying the rules on the statement of claim: the federal courts of first instance and the appellate district courts began to dismiss frivolous actions, requiring plaintiffs to provide more detailed statements of facts underlying their claims. The US Supreme Court in Leatherman and in Swierkiewicz urged the courts not to deviate from the rules of notice pleading, which did not help much because the courts, under the pressure of many frivolous lawsuits, continued the practice of applying the increased standard to civil rights actions. By Twombly and Iqbal, the Supreme Court finally confused the situation as it proposed a new standard for the validity of claims-"plausible" pleading. Twombly and Iqbal attracted both criticism and approval from the legal community, and led to ambiguous consequences in the practice of the courts. The author concludes that, at present, there is uncertainty in the US civil procedure in the interpretation of the rules of pleading, both at the theoretical level and in practice. This work is part of a broader study on the transformation of the US civil procedure. Understanding the processes of restructuring the pleading stage under the pressure of the idea of reducing the judicial caseload seems to be an important step towards this goal.

Keywords

Authors

References