Rodrigo's Extra-Credit Assignment, Can Pleading Be Both Plausible and Fair?

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Article

Abstract

Critical race theory has enabled followers to understand some of the twists and turns of racial history and the rise and fall of constitutional values such as equal protection. But does it have anything useful to say about blackletter subjects such as civil procedure?

In the following chronicle, Rodrigo and his straight man, “the Professor,” discuss whether legal storytelling and narrative analysis can counteract one source of unfairness in our procedural system.

Meeting by chance during a routine errand by the Professor, the two discuss Iqbal, Twombly, and the heightened plausibility requirement they impose for filing a complaint in federal court. After reviewing examples from a number of areas, they conclude that carefully framed stories and counterstories can indeed mitigate the impulse to render snap decisions based on incomplete knowledge, thus broadening judges’ and lawyers’ ideas of what is in fact plausible.

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/lawreview/vol12/iss3/3/

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