Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly

(Slip Opinion) OCTOBER TERM, 2006 1

Syllabus

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is
being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been
prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.
See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Syllabus

BELL ATLANTIC CORP. ET AL. v. TWOMBLY ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR
THE SECOND CIRCUIT

No. 05–1126. Argued November 27, 2006—Decided May 21, 2007
The 1984 divestiture of the American Telephone & Telegraph Com
pany’s (AT&T) local telephone business left a system of regional ser
vice monopolies, sometimes called Incumbent Local Exchange Carri
ers (ILECs), and a separate long-distance market from which the
ILECs were excluded. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 with
drew approval of the ILECs’ monopolies, “fundamentally restruc
tur[ing] local telephone markets” and “subject[ing] [ILECs] to a host
of duties intended to facilitate market entry.” AT&T Corp. v. Iowa
Utilities Bd., 525 U. S. 366, 371. It also authorized them to enter the
long-distance market. “Central to the [new] scheme [was each
ILEC’s] obligation . . . to share its network with” competitive local ex
change carriers (CLECs).” Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Of
fices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, 540 U. S. 398, 402.
Respondents (hereinafter plaintiffs) represent a class of subscribers
of local telephone and/or high speed Internet services in this action
against petitioner ILECs for claimed violations of §1 of the Sherman
Act, which prohibits “[e]very contract, combination in the form of
trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce
among the several States, or with foreign nations.” The complaint al
leges that the ILECs conspired to restrain trade (1) by engaging in
parallel conduct in their respective service areas to inhibit the growth
of upstart CLECs; and (2) by agreeing to refrain from competing
against one another, as indicated by their common failure to pursue
attractive business opportunities in contiguous markets and by a
statement by one ILEC’s chief executive officer that competing in an
other ILEC’s territory did not seem right. The District Court dis
missed the complaint, concluding that parallel business conduct alle
gations, taken alone, do not state a claim under §1; plaintiffs must
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Syllabus

allege additional facts tending to exclude independent self-interested
conduct as an explanation for the parallel actions. Reversing, the
Second Circuit held that plaintiffs’ parallel conduct allegations were
sufficient to withstand a motion to dismiss because the ILECs failed
to show that there is no set of facts that would permit plaintiffs to
demonstrate that the particular parallelism asserted was the product
of collusion rather than coincidence.
Held:
1. Stating a §1 claim requires a complaint with enough factual
matter (taken as true) to suggest that an agreement was made. An
allegation of parallel conduct and a bare assertion of conspiracy will
not suffice. Pp. 6–17.
(a) Because §1 prohibits “only restraints effected by a contract,
combination, or conspiracy,” Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube
Corp., 467 U. S. 752, 775, “[t]he crucial question” is whether the chal
lenged anticompetitive conduct “stem[s] from independent decision or
from an agreement,” Theatre Enterprises, Inc. v. Paramount Film
Distributing Corp., 346 U. S. 537, 540. While a showing of parallel
“business behavior is admissible circumstantial evidence from which”
agreement may be inferred, it falls short of “conclusively estab
lish[ing] agreement or . . . itself constitut[ing] a Sherman Act of
fense.” Id., at 540–541. The inadequacy of showing parallel conduct
or interdependence, without more, mirrors the behavior’s ambiguity:
consistent with conspiracy, but just as much in line with a wide
swath of rational and competitive business strategy unilaterally
prompted by common perceptions of the market. Thus, this Court
has hedged against false inferences from identical behavior at a
number of points in the trial sequence, e.g., at the summary judg
ment stage, see Matsushita Elec. Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio
Corp., 475 U. S. 574. Pp. 6–7.
(b) This case presents the antecedent question of what a plaintiff
must plead in order to state a §1 claim. Federal Rule of Civil Proce
dure 8(a)(2) requires only “a short and plain statement of the claim
showing that the pleader is entitled to relief,” in order to “give the de
fendant fair notice of what the . . . claim is and the grounds upon
which it rests,” Conley v. Gibson, 355 U. S. 41, 47. While a complaint
attacked by a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss does not need detailed
factual allegations, ibid., a plaintiff’s obligation to provide the
“grounds” of his “entitle[ment] to relief” requires more than labels
and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of a cause of action’s ele
ments will not do. Factual allegations must be enough to raise a
right to relief above the speculative level on the assumption that all
of the complaint’s allegations are true. Applying these general stan
dards to a §1 claim, stating a claim requires a complaint with enough
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Syllabus

factual matter to suggest an agreement. Asking for plausible
grounds does not impose a probability requirement at the pleading
stage; it simply calls for enough fact to raise a reasonable expectation
that discovery will reveal evidence of illegal agreement. The need at
the pleading stage for allegations plausibly suggesting (not merely
consistent with) agreement reflects Rule 8(a)(2)’s threshold require
ment that the “plain statement” possess enough heft to “sho[w] that
the pleader is entitled to relief.” A parallel conduct allegation gets
the §1 complaint close to stating a claim, but without further factual
enhancement it stops short of the line between possibility and plau
sibility. The requirement of allegations suggesting an agreement
serves the practical purpose of preventing a plaintiff with “ ‘a largely
groundless claim’ ” from “ ‘tak[ing] up the time of a number of other
people, with the right to do so representing an in terrorem increment
of the settlement value.’ ” Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, 544
U. S. 336, 347. It is one thing to be cautious before dismissing an an
titrust complaint in advance of discovery, but quite another to forget
that proceeding to antitrust discovery can be expensive. That poten
tial expense is obvious here, where plaintiffs represent a putative
class of at least 90 percent of subscribers to local telephone or high-
speed Internet service in an action against America’s largest tele
communications firms for unspecified instances of antitrust viola
tions that allegedly occurred over a 7-year period. It is no answer to
say that a claim just shy of plausible entitlement can be weeded out
early in the discovery process, given the common lament that the suc
cess of judicial supervision in checking discovery abuse has been
modest. Plaintiffs’ main argument against the plausibility standard
at the pleading stage is its ostensible conflict with a literal reading of
Conley’s statement construing Rule 8: “a complaint should not be
dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt
that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim
which would entitle him to relief.” 355 U. S., at 45–46. The “no set of
facts” language has been questioned, criticized, and explained away
long enough by courts and commentators, and is best forgotten as an
incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted pleading standard: once a
claim has been stated adequately, it may be supported by showing
any set of facts consistent with the allegations in the complaint.
Conley described the breadth of opportunity to prove what an ade
quate complaint claims, not the minimum standard of adequate
pleading to govern a complaint’s survival. Pp. 7–17.
2. Under the plausibility standard, plaintiffs’ claim of conspiracy in
restraint of trade comes up short. First, the complaint leaves no
doubt that plaintiffs rest their §1 claim on descriptions of parallel
conduct, not on any independent allegation of actual agreement
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Syllabus

among the ILECs. The nub of the complaint is the ILECs’ parallel
behavior, and its sufficiency turns on the suggestions raised by this
conduct when viewed in light of common economic experience. Noth
ing in the complaint invests either the action or inaction alleged with
a plausible conspiracy suggestion. As to the ILECs’ supposed agree
ment to disobey the 1996 Act and thwart the CLECs’ attempts to
compete, the District Court correctly found that nothing in the com
plaint intimates that resisting the upstarts was anything more than
the natural, unilateral reaction of each ILEC intent on preserving its
regional dominance. The complaint’s general collusion premise fails
to answer the point that there was no need for joint encouragement
to resist the 1996 Act, since each ILEC had reason to try and avoid
dealing with CLECs and would have tried to keep them out, regard
less of the other ILECs’ actions. Plaintiffs’ second conspiracy theory
rests on the competitive reticence among the ILECs themselves in
the wake of the 1996 Act to enter into their competitors’ territories,
leaving the relevant market highly compartmentalized geographi
cally, with minimal competition. This parallel conduct did not sug
gest conspiracy, not if history teaches anything. Monopoly was the
norm in telecommunications, not the exception. Because the ILECs
were born in that world, doubtless liked it, and surely knew the ad
age about him who lives by the sword, a natural explanation for the
noncompetition is that the former Government-sanctioned monopo
lists were sitting tight, expecting their neighbors to do the same. An
titrust conspiracy was not suggested by the facts adduced under ei
ther theory of the complaint, which thus fails to state a valid §1
claim. This analysis does not run counter to Swierkiewicz v. Sorema
N. A., 534 U. S. 506, 508, which held that “a complaint in an em
ployment discrimination lawsuit [need] not contain specific facts es
tablishing a prima facie case of discrimination.” Here, the Court is
not requiring heightened fact pleading of specifics, but only enough
facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face. Because
the plaintiffs here have not nudged their claims across the line from
conceivable to plausible, their complaint must be dismissed. Pp. 18–
24.
425 F. 3d 99, reversed and remanded.

SOUTER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS,
C. J., and SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, BREYER, and ALITO, JJ., joined.
STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, J., joined,
except as to Part IV.
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 1

Opinion of the Court

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to
notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Wash
ington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order
that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________

No. 05–1126
_________________

BELL ATLANTIC CORPORATION, ET AL., PETI-

TIONERS v. WILLIAM TWOMBLY ET AL.

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF

APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT

[May 21, 2007]

JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court.
Liability under §1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U. S. C. §1,
requires a “contract, combination . . . , or conspiracy, in
restraint of trade or commerce.” The question in this
putative class action is whether a §1 complaint can sur
vive a motion to dismiss when it alleges that major tele
communications providers engaged in certain parallel
conduct unfavorable to competition, absent some factual
context suggesting agreement, as distinct from identical,
independent action. We hold that such a complaint should
be dismissed.
I
The upshot of the 1984 divestiture of the American
Telephone & Telegraph Company’s (AT&T) local telephone
business was a system of regional service monopolies
(variously called “Regional Bell Operating Companies,”
“Baby Bells,” or “Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers”
(ILECs)), and a separate, competitive market for long-
distance service from which the ILECs were excluded.
More than a decade later, Congress withdrew approval of
the ILECs’ monopolies by enacting the Telecommunica
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Opinion of the Court

tions Act of 1996 (1996 Act), 110 Stat. 56, which “funda
mentally restructure[d] local telephone markets” and
“subject[ed] [ILECs] to a host of duties intended to facili
tate market entry.” AT&T Corp. v. Iowa Utilities Bd., 525
U. S. 366, 371 (1999). In recompense, the 1996 Act set
conditions for authorizing ILECs to enter the long-
distance market. See 47 U. S. C. §271.
“Central to the [new] scheme [was each ILEC’s] obliga
tion . . . to share its network with competitors,” Verizon
Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko,
LLP, 540 U. S. 398, 402 (2004), which came to be known
as “competitive local exchange carriers” (CLECs), Pet. for
Cert. 6, n. 1. A CLEC could make use of an ILEC’s net
work in any of three ways: by (1) “purchas[ing] local tele
phone services at wholesale rates for resale to end users,”
(2) “leas[ing] elements of the [ILEC’s] network ‘on an
unbundled basis,’ ” or (3) “interconnect[ing] its own facili
ties with the [ILEC’s] network.” Iowa Utilities Bd., supra,
at 371 (quoting 47 U. S. C. §251(c)). Owing to the “consid
erable expense and effort” required to make unbundled
network elements available to rivals at wholesale prices,
Trinko, supra, at 410, the ILECs vigorously litigated the
scope of the sharing obligation imposed by the 1996 Act,
with the result that the Federal Communications Com
mission (FCC) three times revised its regulations to nar
row the range of network elements to be shared with the
CLECs. See Covad Communications Co. v. FCC, 450 F. 3d
528, 533–534 (CADC 2006) (summarizing the 10-year-long
regulatory struggle between the ILECs and CLECs).
Respondents William Twombly and Lawrence Marcus
(hereinafter plaintiffs) represent a putative class consist
ing of all “subscribers of local telephone and/or high speed
internet services . . . from February 8, 1996 to present.”
Amended Complaint in No. 02 CIV. 10220 (GEL) (SDNY)
¶53, App. 28 (hereinafter Complaint). In this action
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Opinion of the Court

against petitioners, a group of ILECs,1 plaintiffs seek
treble damages and declaratory and injunctive relief for
claimed violations of §1 of the Sherman Act, ch. 647, 26
Stat. 209, as amended, 15 U. S. C. §1, which prohibits
“[e]very contract, combination in the form of trust or oth
erwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce
among the several States, or with foreign nations.”
The complaint alleges that the ILECs conspired to re
strain trade in two ways, each supposedly inflating charges
for local telephone and high-speed Internet services.
Plaintiffs say, first, that the ILECs “engaged in parallel
conduct” in their respective service areas to inhibit the
growth of upstart CLECs. Complaint ¶47, App. 23–26.
Their actions allegedly included making unfair agreements
with the CLECs for access to ILEC networks, providing
inferior connections to the networks, overcharging, and
billing in ways designed to sabotage the CLECs’ relations
with their own customers. Ibid. According to the com
plaint, the ILECs’ “compelling common motivatio[n]” to
thwart the CLECs’ competitive efforts naturally led them
to form a conspiracy; “[h]ad any one [ILEC] not sought to
prevent CLECs . . . from competing effectively . . . , the
resulting greater competitive inroads into that [ILEC’s]
territory would have revealed the degree to which competi
tive entry by CLECs would have been successful in the
other territories in the absence of such conduct.” Id., ¶50,
App. 26–27.

——————
1 The 1984 divestiture of AT&T’s local telephone service created seven

Regional Bell Operating Companies. Through a series of mergers and
acquisitions, those seven companies were consolidated into the four
ILECs named in this suit: BellSouth Corporation, Qwest Communica
tions International, Inc., SBC Communications, Inc., and Verizon
Communications, Inc. (successor-in-interest to Bell Atlantic Corpora
tion). Complaint ¶21, App. 16. Together, these ILECs allegedly control
90 percent or more of the market for local telephone service in the 48
contiguous States. Id., ¶48, App. 26.
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Opinion of the Court

Second, the complaint charges agreements by the ILECs
to refrain from competing against one another. These are
to be inferred from the ILECs’ common failure “meaning
fully [to] pursu[e]” “attractive business opportunit[ies]” in
contiguous markets where they possessed “substantial
competitive advantages,” id., ¶¶40–41, App. 21–22, and
from a statement of Richard Notebaert, chief executive
officer (CEO) of the ILEC Qwest, that competing in the
territory of another ILEC “ ‘might be a good way to turn a
quick dollar but that doesn’t make it right,’ ” id., ¶42, App.
22.
The complaint couches its ultimate allegations this way:
“In the absence of any meaningful competition be
tween the [ILECs] in one another’s markets, and in
light of the parallel course of conduct that each en
gaged in to prevent competition from CLECs within
their respective local telephone and/or high speed
internet services markets and the other facts and
market circumstances alleged above, Plaintiffs allege
upon information and belief that [the ILECs] have en
tered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to
prevent competitive entry in their respective local
telephone and/or high speed internet services markets
and have agreed not to compete with one another and
otherwise allocated customers and markets to one an
other.” Id., ¶51, App. 27.2
——————
2 In setting forth the grounds for §1 relief, the complaint repeats

these allegations in substantially similar language:
“Beginning at least as early as February 6, 1996, and continuing to the
present, the exact dates being unknown to Plaintiffs, Defendants and
their co-conspirators engaged in a contract, combination or conspiracy
to prevent competitive entry in their respective local telephone and/or
high speed internet services markets by, among other things, agreeing
not to compete with one another and to stifle attempts by others to
compete with them and otherwise allocating customers and markets to
one another in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.” Id., ¶64,
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Opinion of the Court

The United States District Court for the Southern Dis
trict of New York dismissed the complaint for failure to
state a claim upon which relief can be granted. The Dis
trict Court acknowledged that “plaintiffs may allege a
conspiracy by citing instances of parallel business behav
ior that suggest an agreement,” but emphasized that
“while ‘[c]ircumstantial evidence of consciously parallel
behavior may have made heavy inroads into the tradi
tional judicial attitude toward conspiracy[, . . .] “conscious
parallelism” has not yet read conspiracy out of the
Sherman Act entirely.’ ” 313 F. Supp. 2d 174, 179 (2003)
(quoting Theatre Enterprises, Inc. v. Paramount Film
Distributing Corp., 346 U. S. 537, 541 (1954); alterations
in original). Thus, the District Court understood that
allegations of parallel business conduct, taken alone, do
not state a claim under §1; plaintiffs must allege addi
tional facts that “ten[d] to exclude independent self-
interested conduct as an explanation for defendants’ paral
lel behavior.” 313 F. Supp. 2d, at 179. The District Court
found plaintiffs’ allegations of parallel ILEC actions to
discourage competition inadequate because “the behavior
of each ILEC in resisting the incursion of CLECs is fully
explained by the ILEC’s own interests in defending its
individual territory.” Id., at 183. As to the ILECs’ sup
posed agreement against competing with each other, the
District Court found that the complaint does not “alleg[e]
facts . . . suggesting that refraining from competing in
other territories as CLECs was contrary to [the ILECs’]
apparent economic interests, and consequently [does] not
rais[e] an inference that [the ILECs’] actions were the
result of a conspiracy.” Id., at 188.
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed,
holding that the District Court tested the complaint by the
wrong standard. It held that “plus factors are not required
——————
App. 30–31.
6 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

to be pleaded to permit an antitrust claim based on paral
lel conduct to survive dismissal.” 425 F. 3d 99, 114 (2005)
(emphasis in original). Although the Court of Appeals
took the view that plaintiffs must plead facts that “include
conspiracy among the realm of ‘plausible’ possibilities in
order to survive a motion to dismiss,” it then said that “to
rule that allegations of parallel anticompetitive conduct
fail to support a plausible conspiracy claim, a court would
have to conclude that there is no set of facts that would
permit a plaintiff to demonstrate that the particular paral
lelism asserted was the product of collusion rather than
coincidence.” Ibid.
We granted certiorari to address the proper standard for
pleading an antitrust conspiracy through allegations of
parallel conduct, 547 U. S. ___ (2006), and now reverse.
II

A

Because §1 of the Sherman Act “does not prohibit [all]
unreasonable restraints of trade . . . but only restraints
effected by a contract, combination, or conspiracy,” Cop
perweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U. S. 752,
775 (1984), “[t]he crucial question” is whether the chal
lenged anticompetitive conduct “stem[s] from independent
decision or from an agreement, tacit or express,” Theatre
Enterprises, 346 U. S., at 540. While a showing of parallel
“business behavior is admissible circumstantial evidence
from which the fact finder may infer agreement,” it falls
short of “conclusively establish[ing] agreement or . . . itself
constitut[ing] a Sherman Act offense.” Id., at 540–541.
Even “conscious parallelism,” a common reaction of “firms
in a concentrated market [that] recogniz[e] their shared
economic interests and their interdependence with respect
to price and output decisions” is “not in itself unlawful.”
Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp.,
509 U. S. 209, 227 (1993); see 6 P. Areeda & H. Hovenk
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Opinion of the Court

amp, Antitrust Law ¶1433a, p. 236 (2d ed. 2003) (herein
after Areeda & Hovenkamp) (“The courts are nearly
unanimous in saying that mere interdependent parallel
ism does not establish the contract, combination, or con
spiracy required by Sherman Act §1”); Turner, The Defini
tion of Agreement Under the Sherman Act: Conscious
Parallelism and Refusals to Deal, 75 Harv. L. Rev. 655,
672 (1962) (“[M]ere interdependence of basic price deci
sions is not conspiracy”).
The inadequacy of showing parallel conduct or interde
pendence, without more, mirrors the ambiguity of the
behavior: consistent with conspiracy, but just as much in
line with a wide swath of rational and competitive busi
ness strategy unilaterally prompted by common percep
tions of the market. See, e.g., AEI-Brookings Joint Center
for Regulatory Studies, Epstein, Motions to Dismiss Anti
trust Cases: Separating Fact from Fantasy, Related Publi
cation 06–08, pp. 3–4 (2006) (discussing problem of “false
positives” in §1 suits). Accordingly, we have previously
hedged against false inferences from identical behavior at
a number of points in the trial sequence. An antitrust
conspiracy plaintiff with evidence showing nothing beyond
parallel conduct is not entitled to a directed verdict, see
Theatre Enterprises, supra; proof of a §1 conspiracy must
include evidence tending to exclude the possibility of
independent action, see Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Ser
vice Corp., 465 U. S. 752 (1984); and at the summary
judgment stage a §1 plaintiff’s offer of conspiracy evidence
must tend to rule out the possibility that the defendants
were acting independently, see Matsushita Elec. Indus
trial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U. S. 574 (1986).
B
This case presents the antecedent question of what a
plaintiff must plead in order to state a claim under §1 of
the Sherman Act. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2)
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Opinion of the Court

requires only “a short and plain statement of the claim
showing that the pleader is entitled to relief,” in order to
“give the defendant fair notice of what the . . . claim is and
the grounds upon which it rests,” Conley v. Gibson, 355
U. S. 41, 47 (1957). While a complaint attacked by a Rule
12(b)(6) motion to dismiss does not need detailed factual
allegations, ibid.; Sanjuan v. American Bd. of Psychiatry
and Neurology, Inc., 40 F. 3d 247, 251 (CA7 1994), a plain
tiff’s obligation to provide the “grounds” of his “enti
tle[ment] to relief” requires more than labels and conclu
sions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause
of action will not do, see Papasan v. Allain, 478 U. S. 265,
286 (1986) (on a motion to dismiss, courts “are not bound
to accept as true a legal conclusion couched as a factual
allegation”). Factual allegations must be enough to raise a
right to relief above the speculative level, see 5 C. Wright
& A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure §1216, pp.
235–236 (3d ed. 2004) (hereinafter Wright & Miller)
(“[T]he pleading must contain something more . . . than
. . . a statement of facts that merely creates a suspicion [of]
a legally cognizable right of action”),3 on the assumption
that all the allegations in the complaint are true (even if
——————
3 The dissent greatly oversimplifies matters by suggesting that the

Federal Rules somehow dispensed with the pleading of facts altogether.
See post, at 10 (opinion of STEVENS, J.) (pleading standard of Federal
Rules “does not require, or even invite, the pleading of facts”). While,
for most types of cases, the Federal Rules eliminated the cumbersome
requirement that a claimant “set out in detail the facts upon which he
bases his claim,” Conley v. Gibson, 355 U. S. 41, 47 (1957) (emphasis
added), Rule 8(a)(2) still requires a “showing,” rather than a blanket
assertion, of entitlement to relief. Without some factual allegation in
the complaint, it is hard to see how a claimant could satisfy the re
quirement of providing not only “fair notice” of the nature of the claim,
but also “grounds” on which the claim rests. See 5 Wright & Miller
§1202, at 94, 95 (Rule 8(a) “contemplate[s] the statement of circum
stances, occurrences, and events in support of the claim presented” and
does not authorize a pleader’s “bare averment that he wants relief and
is entitled to it”).
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Opinion of the Court

doubtful in fact), see, e.g., Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N. A.,
534 U. S. 506, 508, n. 1 (2002); Neitzke v. Williams, 490
U. S. 319, 327 (1989) (“Rule 12(b)(6) does not countenance
. . . dismissals based on a judge’s disbelief of a complaint’s
factual allegations”); Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232, 236
(1974) (a well-pleaded complaint may proceed even if it
appears “that a recovery is very remote and unlikely”).
In applying these general standards to a §1 claim, we
hold that stating such a claim requires a complaint with
enough factual matter (taken as true) to suggest that an
agreement was made. Asking for plausible grounds to
infer an agreement does not impose a probability require
ment at the pleading stage; it simply calls for enough fact
to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal
evidence of illegal agreement.4 And, of course, a well-
pleaded complaint may proceed even if it strikes a savvy
judge that actual proof of the facts alleged is improbable,
and “that a recovery is very remote and unlikely.” Ibid.
In identifying facts that are suggestive enough to render a
§1 conspiracy plausible, we have the benefit of the prior
rulings and considered views of leading commentators,
already quoted, that lawful parallel conduct fails to be

——————
4 Commentators have offered several examples of parallel conduct

allegations that would state a §1 claim under this standard. See, e.g., 6
Areeda & Hovenkamp ¶1425, at 167–185 (discussing “parallel behavior
that would probably not result from chance, coincidence, independent
responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence unaided by an
advance understanding among the parties”); Blechman, Conscious
Parallelism, Signalling and Facilitating Devices: The Problem of Tacit
Collusion Under the Antitrust Laws, 24 N. Y. L. S. L. Rev. 881, 899
(1979) (describing “conduct [that] indicates the sort of restricted free
dom of action and sense of obligation that one generally associates with
agreement”). The parties in this case agree that “complex and histori
cally unprecedented changes in pricing structure made at the very
same time by multiple competitors, and made for no other discernible
reason” would support a plausible inference of conspiracy. Brief for
Respondents 37; see also Reply Brief for Petitioners 12.
10 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

speak unlawful agreement. It makes sense to say, there
fore, that an allegation of parallel conduct and a bare
assertion of conspiracy will not suffice. Without more,
parallel conduct does not suggest conspiracy, and a con
clusory allegation of agreement at some unidentified point
does not supply facts adequate to show illegality. Hence,
when allegations of parallel conduct are set out in order to
make a §1 claim, they must be placed in a context that
raises a suggestion of a preceding agreement, not merely
parallel conduct that could just as well be independent
action.
The need at the pleading stage for allegations plausibly
suggesting (not merely consistent with) agreement reflects
the threshold requirement of Rule 8(a)(2) that the “plain
statement” possess enough heft to “sho[w] that the pleader
is entitled to relief.” A statement of parallel conduct, even
conduct consciously undertaken, needs some setting sug
gesting the agreement necessary to make out a §1 claim;
without that further circumstance pointing toward a
meeting of the minds, an account of a defendant’s com
mercial efforts stays in neutral territory. An allegation of
parallel conduct is thus much like a naked assertion of
conspiracy in a §1 complaint: it gets the complaint close to
stating a claim, but without some further factual en
hancement it stops short of the line between possibility
and plausibility of “entitle[ment] to relief.” Cf. DM Re
search, Inc. v. College of Am. Pathologists, 170 F. 3d 53, 56
(CA1 1999) (“[T]erms like ‘conspiracy,’ or even ‘agreement,’
are border-line: they might well be sufficient in conjunc
tion with a more specific allegation—for example, identi
fying a written agreement or even a basis for inferring a
tacit agreement, . . . but a court is not required to accept
such terms as a sufficient basis for a complaint”).5
——————
5 The border in DM Research was the line between the conclusory and

the factual. Here it lies between the factually neutral and the factually
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 11

Opinion of the Court

We alluded to the practical significance of the Rule 8
entitlement requirement in Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v.
Broudo, 544 U. S. 336 (2005), when we explained that
something beyond the mere possibility of loss causation
must be alleged, lest a plaintiff with “ ‘a largely groundless
claim’ ” be allowed to “ ‘take up the time of a number of
other people, with the right to do so representing an in
terrorem increment of the settlement value.’ ” Id., at 347
(quoting Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421
U. S. 723, 741 (1975)). So, when the allegations in a com
plaint, however true, could not raise a claim of entitlement
to relief, “ ‘this basic deficiency should . . . be exposed at
the point of minimum expenditure of time and money by
the parties and the court.’ ” 5 Wright & Miller §1216, at
233–234 (quoting Daves v. Hawaiian Dredging Co., 114
F. Supp. 643, 645 (Haw. 1953)); see also Dura, supra, at
346; Asahi Glass Co. v. Pentech Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 289
F. Supp. 2d 986, 995 (ND Ill. 2003) (Posner, J., sitting by
designation) (“[S]ome threshold of plausibility must be
crossed at the outset before a patent antitrust case should
be permitted to go into its inevitably costly and protracted
discovery phase”).
Thus, it is one thing to be cautious before dismissing an
antitrust complaint in advance of discovery, cf. Poller v.
Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 368 U. S. 464, 473
(1962), but quite another to forget that proceeding to
antitrust discovery can be expensive. As we indicated over
20 years ago in Associated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v.
Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 528, n. 17 (1983), “a district
court must retain the power to insist upon some specificity
in pleading before allowing a potentially massive factual
controversy to proceed.” See also Car Carriers, Inc. v.
Ford Motor Co., 745 F. 2d 1101, 1106 (CA7 1984) (“[T]he
——————

suggestive. Each must be crossed to enter the realm of plausible

liability.

12 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

costs of modern federal antitrust litigation and the in
creasing caseload of the federal courts counsel against
sending the parties into discovery when there is no rea
sonable likelihood that the plaintiffs can construct a claim
from the events related in the complaint”); Note, Modeling
the Effect of One-Way Fee Shifting on Discovery Abuse in
Private Antitrust Litigation, 78 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1887,
1898–1899 (2003) (discussing the unusually high cost of
discovery in antitrust cases); Manual for Complex Litiga
tion, Fourth, §30, p. 519 (2004) (describing extensive
scope of discovery in antitrust cases); Memorandum from
Paul V. Niemeyer, Chair, Advisory Committee on Civil
Rules, to Hon. Anthony J. Scirica, Chair, Committee on
Rules of Practice and Procedure (May 11, 1999), 192
F. R. D. 354, 357 (2000) (reporting that discovery accounts
for as much as 90 percent of litigation costs when discov
ery is actively employed). That potential expense is obvi
ous enough in the present case: plaintiffs represent a
putative class of at least 90 percent of all subscribers to
local telephone or high-speed Internet service in the conti
nental United States, in an action against America’s larg
est telecommunications firms (with many thousands of
employees generating reams and gigabytes of business
records) for unspecified (if any) instances of antitrust
violations that allegedly occurred over a period of seven
years.
It is no answer to say that a claim just shy of a plausible
entitlement to relief can, if groundless, be weeded out
early in the discovery process through “careful case man
agement,” post at 4, given the common lament that the
success of judicial supervision in checking discovery abuse
has been on the modest side. See, e.g., Easterbrook, Dis
covery as Abuse, 69 B. U. L. Rev. 635, 638 (1989) (“Judges
can do little about impositional discovery when parties
control the legal claims to be presented and conduct the
discovery themselves”). And it is self-evident that the
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 13

Opinion of the Court

problem of discovery abuse cannot be solved by “careful
scrutiny of evidence at the summary judgment stage,”
much less “lucid instructions to juries,” post, at 4; the
threat of discovery expense will push cost-conscious defen
dants to settle even anemic cases before reaching those
proceedings. Probably, then, it is only by taking care to
require allegations that reach the level suggesting con
spiracy that we can hope to avoid the potentially enor
mous expense of discovery in cases with no “ ‘reasonably
founded hope that the [discovery] process will reveal rele
vant evidence’ ” to support a §1 claim. Dura, 544 U. S., at
347 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps, supra, at 741; alteration
in Dura).6
——————
6 The dissent takes heart in the reassurances of plaintiffs’ counsel

that discovery would be “ ‘ “phased” ’ ” and “limited to the existence of
the alleged conspiracy and class certification.” Post, at 24. But deter
mining whether some illegal agreement may have taken place between
unspecified persons at different ILECs (each a multibillion dollar
corporation with legions of management level employees) at some point
over seven years is a sprawling, costly, and hugely time-consuming
undertaking not easily susceptible to the kind of line drawing and case
management that the dissent envisions. Perhaps the best answer to
the dissent’s optimism that antitrust discovery is open to effective
judicial control is a more extensive quotation of the authority just cited,
a judge with a background in antitrust law. Given the system that we
have, the hope of effective judicial supervision is slim: “The timing is all
wrong. The plaintiff files a sketchy complaint (the Rules of Civil
Procedure discourage fulsome documents), and discovery is launched.
A judicial officer does not know the details of the case the parties will
present and in theory cannot know the details. Discovery is used to
find the details. The judicial officer always knows less than the parties,
and the parties themselves may not know very well where they are
going or what they expect to find. A magistrate supervising discovery
does not—cannot—know the expected productivity of a given request,
because the nature of the requester’s claim and the contents of the files
(or head) of the adverse party are unknown. Judicial officers cannot
measure the costs and benefits to the requester and so cannot isolate
impositional requests. Requesters have no reason to disclose their own
estimates because they gain from imposing costs on rivals (and may
lose from an improvement in accuracy). The portions of the Rules of
14 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

Plaintiffs do not, of course, dispute the requirement of
plausibility and the need for something more than merely
parallel behavior explained in Theatre Enterprises, Mon
santo, and Matsushita, and their main argument against
the plausibility standard at the pleading stage is its osten
sible conflict with an early statement of ours construing
Rule 8. Justice Black’s opinion for the Court in Conley v.
Gibson spoke not only of the need for fair notice of the
grounds for entitlement to relief but of “the accepted rule
that a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to
state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the
plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim
which would entitle him to relief.” 355 U. S., at 45–46.
This “no set of facts” language can be read in isolation as
saying that any statement revealing the theory of the
claim will suffice unless its factual impossibility may be
shown from the face of the pleadings; and the Court of
Appeals appears to have read Conley in some such way
when formulating its understanding of the proper plead
ing standard, see 425 F. 3d, at 106, 114 (invoking Conley’s
“no set of facts” language in describing the standard for
dismissal).7
——————
Civil Procedure calling on judges to trim back excessive demands,
therefore, have been, and are doomed to be, hollow. We cannot prevent
what we cannot detect; we cannot detect what we cannot define; we
cannot define ‘abusive’ discovery except in theory, because in practice
we lack essential information.” Easterbrook, Discovery as Abuse, 69 B.
U. L. Rev. 635, 638–639 (1989).
7 The Court of Appeals also relied on Chief Judge Clark’s suggestion

in Nagler v. Admiral Corp., 248 F. 3d 319 (CA2 1957), that facts indi
cating parallel conduct alone suffice to state a claim under §1. 425
F. 3d, at 114 (citing Nagler, supra, at 325). But Nagler gave no expla
nation for citing Theatre Enterprises (which upheld a denial of a di
rected verdict for plaintiff on the ground that proof of parallelism was
not proof of conspiracy) as authority that pleading parallel conduct
sufficed to plead a Sherman Act conspiracy. Now that Monsanto Co. v.
Spray-Rite Service Corp., 465 U. S. 752 (1984), and Matsushita Elec.
Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U. S. 574 (1986), have made it
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 15

Opinion of the Court

On such a focused and literal reading of Conley’s “no set
of facts,” a wholly conclusory statement of claim would
survive a motion to dismiss whenever the pleadings left
open the possibility that a plaintiff might later establish
some “set of [undisclosed] facts” to support recovery. So
here, the Court of Appeals specifically found the prospect
of unearthing direct evidence of conspiracy sufficient to
preclude dismissal, even though the complaint does not set
forth a single fact in a context that suggests an agreement.
425 F. 3d, at 106, 114. It seems fair to say that this ap
proach to pleading would dispense with any showing of a
“ ‘reasonably founded hope’ ” that a plaintiff would be able
to make a case, see Dura, 544 U. S., at 347 (quoting Blue
Chip Stamps, 421 U. S., at 741); Mr. Micawber’s optimism
would be enough.
Seeing this, a good many judges and commentators have
balked at taking the literal terms of the Conley passage as
a pleading standard. See, e.g., Car Carriers, 745 F. 2d, at
1106 (“Conley has never been interpreted literally” and,
“[i]n practice, a complaint . . . must contain either direct or
inferential allegations respecting all the material elements
necessary to sustain recovery under some viable legal
theory” (internal quotation marks omitted; emphasis and
omission in original); Ascon Properties, Inc. v. Mobil Oil
Co., 866 F. 2d 1149, 1155 (CA9 1989) (tension between
Conley’s “no set of facts” language and its acknowledgment
that a plaintiff must provide the “grounds” on which his
claim rests); O’Brien v. DiGrazia, 544 F. 2d 543, 546, n. 3
(CA1 1976) (“[W]hen a plaintiff . . . supplies facts to sup
port his claim, we do not think that Conley imposes a duty
on the courts to conjure up unpleaded facts that might

——————
clear that neither parallel conduct nor conscious parallelism, taken
alone, raise the necessary implication of conspiracy, it is time for a
fresh look at adequacy of pleading when a claim rests on parallel
action.
16 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

turn a frivolous claim of unconstitutional . . . action into a
substantial one”); McGregor v. Industrial Excess Landfill,
Inc., 856 F. 2d 39, 42–43 (CA6 1988) (quoting O’Brien’s
analysis); Hazard, From Whom No Secrets Are Hid, 76
Tex. L. Rev. 1665, 1685 (1998) (describing Conley as having
“turned Rule 8 on its head”); Marcus, The Revival of Fact
Pleading Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, 86
Colum. L. Rev. 433, 463–465 (1986) (noting tension be
tween Conley and subsequent understandings of Rule 8).
We could go on, but there is no need to pile up further
citations to show that Conley’s “no set of facts” language
has been questioned, criticized, and explained away long
enough. To be fair to the Conley Court, the passage
should be understood in light of the opinion’s preceding
summary of the complaint’s concrete allegations, which
the Court quite reasonably understood as amply stating a
claim for relief. But the passage so often quoted fails to
mention this understanding on the part of the Court, and
after puzzling the profession for 50 years, this famous
observation has earned its retirement. The phrase is best
forgotten as an incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted
pleading standard: once a claim has been stated ade
quately, it may be supported by showing any set of facts
consistent with the allegations in the complaint. See
Sanjuan, 40 F. 3d, at 251 (once a claim for relief has been
stated, a plaintiff “receives the benefit of imagination, so
long as the hypotheses are consistent with the complaint”);
accord, Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 514; National Organi
zation for Women, Inc. v. Scheidler, 510 U. S. 249, 256
(1994); H. J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co., 492
U. S. 229, 249–250 (1989); Hishon v. King & Spalding, 467
U. S. 69, 73 (1984). Conley, then, described the breadth of
opportunity to prove what an adequate complaint claims,
not the minimum standard of adequate pleading to govern
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 17

Opinion of the Court

a complaint’s survival.8
——————
8 Because Conley’s “ ‘no set of facts’ ” language was one of our earliest
statements about pleading under the Federal Rules, it is no surprise
that it has since been “cited as authority” by this Court and others.
Post, at 8. Although we have not previously explained the circum
stances and rejected the literal reading of the passage embraced by the
Court of Appeals, our analysis comports with this Court’s statements in
the years since Conley. See Dura, 544 U. S., at 347 (quoting Blue Chip
Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U. S. 723, 741 (1975); (requiring
“ ‘reasonably founded hope that the [discovery] process will reveal
relevant evidence’ ” to support the claim (alteration in Dura)); Associ
ated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 526
(1983) (“It is not . . . proper to assume that [the plaintiff] can prove
facts that it has not alleged or that the defendants have violated the
antitrust laws in ways that have not been alleged”); Wilson v. Schnet
tler, 365 U. S. 381, 383 (1961) (“In the absence of . . . an allegation [that
the arrest was made without probable cause] the courts below could
not, nor can we, assume that respondents arrested petitioner without
probable cause to believe that he had committed . . . a narcotics of
fense”). Nor are we reaching out to decide this issue in a case where
the matter was not raised by the parties, see post, at 10, since both the
ILECs and the Government highlight the problems stemming from a
literal interpretation of Conley’s “no set of facts” language and seek
clarification of the standard. Brief for Petitioners 27–28; Brief for
United States as Amicus Curiae 22–25; see also Brief for Respondents
17 (describing “[p]etitioners and their amici” as mounting an “attack on
Conley’s ‘no set of facts’ standard”).
The dissent finds relevance in Court of Appeals precedents from the
1940s, which allegedly gave rise to Conley’s “no set of facts” language.
See post, at 11–13. Even indulging this line of analysis, these cases do
not challenge the understanding that, before proceeding to discovery, a
complaint must allege facts suggestive of illegal conduct. See, e.g.,
Leimer v. State Mut. Life Assur. Co., 108 F. 2d 302, 305 (CA8 1940)
(“ ‘[I]f, in view of what is alleged, it can reasonably be conceived that the
plaintiffs . . . could, upon a trial, establish a case which would entitle
them to . . . relief, the motion to dismiss should not have been
granted’ ”); Continental Collieries, Inc. v. Shober, 130 F. 2d 631, 635
(CA3 1942) (“No matter how likely it may seem that the pleader will be
unable to prove his case, he is entitled, upon averring a claim, to an
opportunity to try to prove it”). Rather, these cases stand for the
unobjectionable proposition that, when a complaint adequately states a
claim, it may not be dismissed based on a district court’s assessment
18 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

III

When we look for plausibility in this complaint, we
agree with the District Court that plaintiffs’ claim of
conspiracy in restraint of trade comes up short. To begin
with, the complaint leaves no doubt that plaintiffs rest
their §1 claim on descriptions of parallel conduct and not
on any independent allegation of actual agreement among
the ILECs. Supra, at 4. Although in form a few stray
statements speak directly of agreement,9 on fair reading
these are merely legal conclusions resting on the prior
allegations. Thus, the complaint first takes account of the
alleged “absence of any meaningful competition between
[the ILECs] in one another’s markets,” “the parallel course
of conduct that each [ILEC] engaged in to prevent compe
tition from CLECs,” “and the other facts and market
circumstances alleged [earlier]”; “in light of” these, the
complaint concludes “that [the ILECs] have entered into a
contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive
entry into their . . . markets and have agreed not to com
pete with one another.” Complaint ¶51, App. 27.10 The
——————
that the plaintiff will fail to find evidentiary support for his allegations
or prove his claim to the satisfaction of the factfinder. Cf. Scheuer v.
Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232, 236 (1974) (a district court weighing a motion to
dismiss asks “not whether a plaintiff will ultimately prevail but
whether the claimant is entitled to offer evidence to support the
claims”).
9 See Complaint ¶¶51, 64, App. 27, 30–31 (alleging that ILECs en

gaged in a “contract, combination or conspiracy” and agreed not to
compete with one another).
10 If the complaint had not explained that the claim of agreement

rested on the parallel conduct described, we doubt that the complaint’s
references to an agreement among the ILECs would have given the
notice required by Rule 8. Apart from identifying a seven-year span in
which the §1 violations were supposed to have occurred (i.e.,
“[b]eginning at least as early as February 6, 1996, and continuing to the
present,” id., ¶64, App. 30), the pleadings mentioned no specific time,
place, or person involved in the alleged conspiracies. This lack of notice
contrasts sharply with the model form for pleading negligence, Form 9,
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 19

Opinion of the Court

nub of the complaint, then, is the ILECs’ parallel behavior,
consisting of steps to keep the CLECs out and manifest
disinterest in becoming CLECs themselves, and its suffi
ciency turns on the suggestions raised by this conduct
when viewed in light of common economic experience.11
We think that nothing contained in the complaint in
vests either the action or inaction alleged with a plausible
suggestion of conspiracy. As to the ILECs’ supposed
agreement to disobey the 1996 Act and thwart the CLECs’
attempts to compete, we agree with the District Court that
nothing in the complaint intimates that the resistance to
the upstarts was anything more than the natural, unilat
eral reaction of each ILEC intent on keeping its regional
dominance. The 1996 Act did more than just subject the
ILECs to competition; it obliged them to subsidize their
competitors with their own equipment at wholesale rates.
The economic incentive to resist was powerful, but resist
ing competition is routine market conduct, and even if the
ILECs flouted the 1996 Act in all the ways the plaintiffs
allege, see id., ¶47, App. 23–24, there is no reason to infer
that the companies had agreed among themselves to do
what was only natural anyway; so natural, in fact, that if

——————
which the dissent says exemplifies the kind of “bare allegation” that
survives a motion to dismiss. Post, at 6. Whereas the model form
alleges that the defendant struck the plaintiff with his car while
plaintiff was crossing a particular highway at a specified date and time,
the complaint here furnishes no clue as to which of the four ILECs
(much less which of their employees) supposedly agreed, or when and
where the illicit agreement took place. A defendant wishing to prepare
an answer in the simple fact pattern laid out in Form 9 would know
what to answer; a defendant seeking to respond to plaintiffs’ conclusory
allegations in the §1 context would have little idea where to begin.
11 The dissent’s quotations from the complaint leave the impression

that plaintiffs directly allege illegal agreement; in fact, they proceed
exclusively via allegations of parallel conduct, as both the District
Court and Court of Appeals recognized. See 313 F. Supp. 2d 174, 182
(SDNY 2003); 425 F. 3d 99, 102–104 (CA 2005).
20 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

alleging parallel decisions to resist competition were
enough to imply an antitrust conspiracy, pleading a §1
violation against almost any group of competing busi
nesses would be a sure thing.
The complaint makes its closest pass at a predicate for
conspiracy with the claim that collusion was necessary
because success by even one CLEC in an ILEC’s territory
“would have revealed the degree to which competitive
entry by CLECs would have been successful in the other
territories.” Id., ¶50, App. 26–27. But, its logic aside, this
general premise still fails to answer the point that there
was just no need for joint encouragement to resist the
1996 Act; as the District Court said, “each ILEC has rea
son to want to avoid dealing with CLECs” and “each ILEC
would attempt to keep CLECs out, regardless of the ac
tions of the other ILECs.” 313 F. Supp. 2d, at 184; cf.
Kramer v. Pollock-Krasner Foundation, 890 F. Supp. 250,
256 (SDNY 1995) (while the plaintiff “may believe the
defendants conspired . . . , the defendants’ allegedly
conspiratorial actions could equally have been prompted
by lawful, independent goals which do not constitute a
conspiracy”).12
Plaintiffs’ second conspiracy theory rests on the com
petitive reticence among the ILECs themselves in the
wake of the 1996 Act, which was supposedly passed in the
“ ‘hop[e] that the large incumbent local monopoly compa
nies . . . might attack their neighbors’ service areas, as
——————
12 From the allegation that the ILECs belong to various trade associa

tions, see Complaint ¶46, App. 23, the dissent playfully suggests that
they conspired to restrain trade, an inference said to be “buttressed by
the common sense of Adam Smith.” Post, at 22, 25–26. If Adam Smith
is peering down today, he may be surprised to learn that his tongue-in
cheek remark would be authority to force his famous pinmaker to
devote financial and human capital to hire lawyers, prepare for deposi
tions, and otherwise fend off allegations of conspiracy; all this just
because he belonged to the same trade guild as one of his competitors
when their pins carried the same price tag.
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 21

Opinion of the Court

they are the best situated to do so.’ ” Complaint ¶38, App.
20 (quoting Consumer Federation of America, Lessons
from 1996 Telecommunications Act: Deregulation Before
Meaningful Competition Spells Consumer Disaster, p. 12
(Feb. 2000). Contrary to hope, the ILECs declined “ ‘to
enter each other’s service territories in any significant
way,’ ” Complaint ¶38, App. 20, and the local telephone
and high speed Internet market remains highly compart
mentalized geographically, with minimal competition.
Based on this state of affairs, and perceiving the ILECs to
be blessed with “especially attractive business opportuni
ties” in surrounding markets dominated by other ILECs,
the plaintiffs assert that the ILECs’ parallel conduct was
“strongly suggestive of conspiracy.” Id., ¶40, App. 21.
But it was not suggestive of conspiracy, not if history
teaches anything. In a traditionally unregulated industry
with low barriers to entry, sparse competition among large
firms dominating separate geographical segments of the
market could very well signify illegal agreement, but here
we have an obvious alternative explanation. In the decade
preceding the 1996 Act and well before that, monopoly was
the norm in telecommunications, not the exception. See
Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC, 535 U. S. 467, 477–
478 (2002) (describing telephone service providers as
traditional public monopolies). The ILECs were born in
that world, doubtless liked the world the way it was, and
surely knew the adage about him who lives by the sword.
Hence, a natural explanation for the noncompetition
alleged is that the former Government-sanctioned mo
nopolists were sitting tight, expecting their neighbors to
do the same thing.
In fact, the complaint itself gives reasons to believe that
the ILECs would see their best interests in keeping to
their old turf. Although the complaint says generally that
the ILECs passed up “especially attractive business oppor
tunit[ies]” by declining to compete as CLECs against other
22 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

ILECs, Complaint ¶40, App. 21, it does not allege that
competition as CLECs was potentially any more lucrative
than other opportunities being pursued by the ILECs
during the same period,13 and the complaint is replete
with indications that any CLEC faced nearly insurmount
able barriers to profitability owing to the ILECs’ flagrant
resistance to the network sharing requirements of the
1996 Act, id., ¶47; App. 23–26. Not only that, but even
without a monopolistic tradition and the peculiar difficulty
of mandating shared networks, “[f]irms do not expand
without limit and none of them enters every market that
an outside observer might regard as profitable, or even a
small portion of such markets.” Areeda & Hovenkamp
¶307d, at 155 (Supp. 2006) (commenting on the case at
bar). The upshot is that Congress may have expected
some ILECs to become CLECs in the legacy territories of
other ILECs, but the disappointment does not make con
spiracy plausible. We agree with the District Court’s
assessment that antitrust conspiracy was not suggested by
the facts adduced under either theory of the complaint,

——————
13 The complaint quoted a reported statement of Qwest’s CEO, Rich

ard Notebaert, to suggest that the ILECs declined to compete against
each other despite recognizing that it “ ‘might be a good way to turn a
quick dollar.’ ” ¶42, App. 22 (quoting Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 2002,
Business Section, p. 1). This was only part of what he reportedly said,
however, and the District Court was entitled to take notice of the full
contents of the published articles referenced in the complaint, from
which the truncated quotations were drawn. See Fed. Rule Evid. 201.
Notebaert was also quoted as saying that entering new markets as a
CLEC would not be “a sustainable economic model” because the CLEC
pricing model is “just . . . nuts.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 2002, Busi
ness Section, p. 1 (cited at Complaint ¶42, App. 22). Another source
cited in the complaint quotes Notebaert as saying he thought it “un
wise” to “base a business plan” on the privileges accorded to CLECs
under the 1996 Act because the regulatory environment was too unsta
ble. Chicago Tribune, Dec. 19, 2002, Business Section, p. 2 (cited at
Complaint ¶45, App. 23).
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 23

Opinion of the Court

which thus fails to state a valid §1 claim.14
Plaintiffs say that our analysis runs counter to
Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N. A., 534 U. S. 506, 508 (2002),
which held that “a complaint in an employment discrimi
nation lawsuit [need] not contain specific facts establish
ing a prima facie case of discrimination under the frame
work set forth in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411
U. S. 792 (1973).” They argue that just as the prima facie
case is a “flexible evidentiary standard” that “should not
be transposed into a rigid pleading standard for discrimi
nation cases,” Swierkiewicz, supra, at 512, “transpos[ing]
‘plus factor’ summary judgment analysis woodenly into a
rigid Rule 12(b)(6) pleading standard . . . would be un
wise,” Brief for Respondents 39. As the District Court
correctly understood, however, “Swierkiewicz did not
change the law of pleading, but simply re-emphasized . . .
that the Second Circuit’s use of a heightened pleading
standard for Title VII cases was contrary to the Federal
Rules’ structure of liberal pleading requirements.” 313
F. Supp. 2d, at 181 (citation and footnote omitted). Even
though Swierkiewicz’s pleadings “detailed the events
leading to his termination, provided relevant dates, and
included the ages and nationalities of at least some of the
relevant persons involved with his termination,” the Court
——————
14 In reaching this conclusion, we do not apply any “heightened”

pleading standard, nor do we seek to broaden the scope of Federal Rule
of Civil Procedure 9, which can only be accomplished “ ‘by the process of
amending the Federal Rules, and not by judicial interpretation.’ ”
Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N. A., 534 U. S. 506, 515 (2002) (quoting
Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination
Unit, 507 U. S. 163, 168 (1993)). On certain subjects understood to
raise a high risk of abusive litigation, a plaintiff must state factual
allegations with greater particularity than Rule 8 requires. Fed. Rules
Civ. Proc. 9(b)–(c). Here, our concern is not that the allegations in the
complaint were insufficiently “particular[ized]”, ibid.; rather, the
complaint warranted dismissal because it failed in toto to render
plaintiffs’ entitlement to relief plausible.
24 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

Opinion of the Court

of Appeals dismissed his complaint for failing to allege
certain additional facts that Swierkiewicz would need at
the trial stage to support his claim in the absence of direct
evidence of discrimination. Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at
514. We reversed on the ground that the Court of Appeals
had impermissibly applied what amounted to a height
ened pleading requirement by insisting that Swierkiewicz
allege “specific facts” beyond those necessary to state his
claim and the grounds showing entitlement to relief. Id.,
at 508.
Here, in contrast, we do not require heightened fact
pleading of specifics, but only enough facts to state a claim
to relief that is plausible on its face. Because the plaintiffs
here have not nudged their claims across the line from
conceivable to plausible, their complaint must be dismissed.
* * *
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit is reversed, and the cause is remanded for further
proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 1

STEVENS, J., dissenting

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________

No. 05–1126
_________________

BELL ATLANTIC CORPORATION, ET AL., PETI-

TIONERS v. WILLIAM TWOMBLY ET AL.

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF

APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT

[May 21, 2007]

JUSTICE STEVENS, with whom JUSTICE GINSBURG joins
except as to Part IV, dissenting.
In the first paragraph of its 24-page opinion the Court
states that the question to be decided is whether allega
tions that “major telecommunications providers engaged
in certain parallel conduct unfavorable to competition”
suffice to state a violation of §1 of the Sherman Act. Ante,
at 1. The answer to that question has been settled for
more than 50 years. If that were indeed the issue, a
summary reversal citing Theatre Enterprises, Inc. v.
Paramount Film Distributing Corp., 346 U. S. 537 (1954),
would adequately resolve this case. As Theatre Enter
prises held, parallel conduct is circumstantial evidence
admissible on the issue of conspiracy, but it is not itself
illegal. Id., at 540–542.
Thus, this is a case in which there is no dispute about
the substantive law. If the defendants acted independ
ently, their conduct was perfectly lawful. If, however, that
conduct is the product of a horizontal agreement among
potential competitors, it was unlawful. Plaintiffs have
alleged such an agreement and, because the complaint
was dismissed in advance of answer, the allegation has
not even been denied. Why, then, does the case not pro
ceed? Does a judicial opinion that the charge is not “plau
sible” provide a legally acceptable reason for dismissing
2 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

the complaint? I think not.
Respondents’ amended complaint describes a variety of
circumstantial evidence and makes the straightforward
allegation that petitioners
“entered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to
prevent competitive entry in their respective local
telephone and/or high speed internet services markets
and have agreed not to compete with one another and
otherwise allocated customers and markets to one an
other.” Amended Complaint in No. 02 CIV. 10220
(GEL) (SDNY) ¶51, App. 27 (hereinafter Complaint).
The complaint explains that, contrary to Congress’ expec
tation when it enacted the 1996 Telecommunications Act,
and consistent with their own economic self-interests,
petitioner Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs)
have assiduously avoided infringing upon each other’s
markets and have refused to permit nonincumbent com
petitors to access their networks. The complaint quotes
Richard Notebaert, the former CEO of one such ILEC, as
saying that competing in a neighboring ILEC’s territory
“might be a good way to turn a quick dollar but that
doesn’t make it right.” Id., ¶42, App. 22. Moreover, re
spondents allege that petitioners “communicate amongst
themselves” through numerous industry associations. Id.,
¶46, App. 23. In sum, respondents allege that petitioners
entered into an agreement that has long been recognized
as a classic per se violation of the Sherman Act. See Re
port of the Attorney General’s National Committee to
Study the Antitrust Laws 26 (1955).
Under rules of procedure that have been well settled
since well before our decision in Theatre Enterprises, a
judge ruling on a defendant’s motion to dismiss a com
plaint, “must accept as true all of the factual allegations
contained in the complaint.” Swierkiewicz v. Sorema
N. A., 534 U. S. 506, 508, n. 1 (2002); see Overstreet v.
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 3

STEVENS, J., dissenting

North Shore Corp., 318 U. S. 125, 127 (1943). But instead
of requiring knowledgeable executives such as Notebaert
to respond to these allegations by way of sworn deposi
tions or other limited discovery—and indeed without so
much as requiring petitioners to file an answer denying
that they entered into any agreement—the majority per
mits immediate dismissal based on the assurances of
company lawyers that nothing untoward was afoot. The
Court embraces the argument of those lawyers that “there
is no reason to infer that the companies had agreed among
themselves to do what was only natural anyway,” ante, at
19; that “there was just no need for joint encouragement to
resist the 1996 Act,” ante, at 20; and that the “natural
explanation for the noncompetition alleged is that the
former Government-sanctioned monopolists were sitting
tight, expecting their neighbors to do the same thing,”
ante, at 21.
The Court and petitioners’ legal team are no doubt
correct that the parallel conduct alleged is consistent with
the absence of any contract, combination, or conspiracy.
But that conduct is also entirely consistent with the pres
ence of the illegal agreement alleged in the complaint.
And the charge that petitioners “agreed not to compete
with one another” is not just one of “a few stray state
ments,” ante, at 18; it is an allegation describing unlawful
conduct. As such, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,
our longstanding precedent, and sound practice mandate
that the District Court at least require some sort of re
sponse from petitioners before dismissing the case.
Two practical concerns presumably explain the Court’s
dramatic departure from settled procedural law. Private
antitrust litigation can be enormously expensive, and
there is a risk that jurors may mistakenly conclude that
evidence of parallel conduct has proved that the parties
acted pursuant to an agreement when they in fact merely
made similar independent decisions. Those concerns
4 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

merit careful case management, including strict control of
discovery, careful scrutiny of evidence at the summary
judgment stage, and lucid instructions to juries; they do
not, however, justify the dismissal of an adequately
pleaded complaint without even requiring the defendants
to file answers denying a charge that they in fact engaged
in collective decisionmaking. More importantly, they do
not justify an interpretation of Federal Rule of Civil Pro
cedure 12(b)(6) that seems to be driven by the majority’s
appraisal of the plausibility of the ultimate factual allega
tion rather than its legal sufficiency.
I
Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules requires that a com
plaint contain “a short and plain statement of the claim
showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” The rule did
not come about by happenstance and its language is not
inadvertent. The English experience with Byzantine
special pleading rules—illustrated by the hypertechnical
Hilary rules of 18341—made obvious the appeal of a plead
ing standard that was easy for the common litigant to
understand and sufficed to put the defendant on notice as
to the nature of the claim against him and the relief
sought. Stateside, David Dudley Field developed the
highly influential New York Code of 1848, which required
“[a] statement of the facts constituting the cause of action,
in ordinary and concise language, without repetition, and
in such a manner as to enable a person of common under
standing to know what is intended.” An Act to Simplify
and Abridge the Practice, Pleadings and Proceedings of
the Courts of this State, ch. 379, §120(2), 1848 N. Y. Laws
pp. 497, 521. Substantially similar language appeared in
the Federal Equity Rules adopted in 1912. See Fed. Eq
uity Rule 25 (requiring “a short and simple statement of
——————
1 See 9 W. Holdsworth, History of English Law 324–327 (1926).
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 5

STEVENS, J., dissenting

the ultimate facts upon which the plaintiff asks relief,
omitting any mere statement of evidence”).
A difficulty arose, however, in that the Field Code and
its progeny required a plaintiff to plead “facts” rather than
“conclusions,” a distinction that proved far easier to say
than to apply. As commentators have noted,
“it is virtually impossible logically to distinguish
among ‘ultimate facts,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘conclusions.’
Essentially any allegation in a pleading must be an
assertion that certain occurrences took place. The
pleading spectrum, passing from evidence through ul
timate facts to conclusions, is largely a continuum
varying only in the degree of particularity with which
the occurrences are described.” Weinstein & Distler,
Comments on Procedural Reform: Drafting Pleading
Rules, 57 Colum. L. Rev. 518, 520–521 (1957).
See also Cook, Statements of Fact in Pleading Under the
Codes, 21 Colum. L. Rev. 416, 417 (1921) (hereinafter
Cook) (“[T]here is no logical distinction between state
ments which are grouped by the courts under the phrases
‘statements of fact’ and ‘conclusions of law’ ”). Rule 8 was
directly responsive to this difficulty. Its drafters inten
tionally avoided any reference to “facts” or “evidence” or
“conclusions.” See 5 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Prac
tice and Procedure §1216, p. 207 (3d ed. 2004) (hereinafter
Wright & Miller) (“The substitution of ‘claim showing that
the pleader is entitled to relief’ for the code formulation of
the ‘facts’ constituting a ‘cause of action’ was intended to
avoid the distinctions drawn under the codes among ‘evi
dentiary facts,’ ‘ultimate facts,’ and ‘conclusions’ . . .”).
Under the relaxed pleading standards of the Federal
Rules, the idea was not to keep litigants out of court but
rather to keep them in. The merits of a claim would be
sorted out during a flexible pretrial process and, as appro
priate, through the crucible of trial. See Swierkiewicz, 534
6 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

U. S., at 514 (“The liberal notice pleading of Rule 8(a) is
the starting point of a simplified pleading system, which
was adopted to focus litigation on the merits of a claim”).
Charles E. Clark, the “principal draftsman” of the Federal
Rules,2 put it thus:
“Experience has shown . . . that we cannot expect the
proof of the case to be made through the pleadings,
and that such proof is really not their function. We
can expect a general statement distinguishing the
case from all others, so that the manner and form of
trial and remedy expected are clear, and so that a
permanent judgment will result.” The New Federal
Rules of Civil Procedure: The Last Phase—Underlying
Philosophy Embodied in Some of the Basic Provisions
of the New Procedure, 23 A. B. A. J. 976, 977 (1937)
(hereinafter Clark, New Federal Rules).
The pleading paradigm under the new Federal Rules was
well illustrated by the inclusion in the appendix of Form 9,
a complaint for negligence. As relevant, the Form 9 com
plaint states only: “On June 1, 1936, in a public highway
called Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts, defen
dant negligently drove a motor vehicle against plaintiff
who was then crossing said highway.” Form 9, Complaint
for Negligence, Forms App., Fed. Rules Civ. Proc., 28
U. S. C. App., p. 829 (hereinafter Form 9). The complaint
then describes the plaintiff’s injuries and demands judg
ment. The asserted ground for relief—namely, the defen
dant’s negligent driving—would have been called a “ ‘con
clusion of law’ ” under the code pleading of old. See, e.g.,
Cook 419. But that bare allegation suffices under a sys
tem that “restrict[s] the pleadings to the task of general
notice-giving and invest[s] the deposition-discovery proc

——————
2 Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U. S. 271, 283

(1988).
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 7

STEVENS, J., dissenting

ess with a vital role in the preparation for trial.”3 Hick
man v. Taylor, 329 U. S. 495, 501 (1947); see also
Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 513, n. 4 (citing Form 9 as an
example of “ ‘the simplicity and brevity of statement which
the rules contemplate’ ”); Thomson v. Washington, 362
F. 3d 969, 970 (CA7 2004) (Posner, J.) (“The federal rules
replaced fact pleading with notice pleading”).
II
It is in the context of this history that Conley v. Gibson,
355 U. S. 41 (1957), must be understood. The Conley
plaintiffs were black railroad workers who alleged that
their union local had refused to protect them against
discriminatory discharges, in violation of the National
Railway Labor Act. The union sought to dismiss the
complaint on the ground that its general allegations of
discriminatory treatment by the defendants lacked suffi
cient specificity. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice
Black rejected the union’s claim as foreclosed by the lan
guage of Rule 8. Id., at 47–48. In the course of doing so,
he articulated the formulation the Court rejects today: “In
appraising the sufficiency of the complaint we follow, of
course, the accepted rule that a complaint should not be
dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears
beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in
support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.”
Id., at 45–46.
Consistent with the design of the Federal Rules,
Conley’s “no set of facts” formulation permits outright
dismissal only when proceeding to discovery or beyond
——————
3 The Federal Rules do impose a “particularity” requirement on “all

averments of fraud or mistake,” Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 9(b), neither of
which has been alleged in this case. We have recognized that the canon
of expresio unius est exclusio alterius applies to Rule 9(b). See Leather-
man v. Tarrant Cty. Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 507
U. S. 163, 168 (1993).
8 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

would be futile. Once it is clear that a plaintiff has stated
a claim that, if true, would entitle him to relief, matters of
proof are appropriately relegated to other stages of the
trial process. Today, however, in its explanation of a
decision to dismiss a complaint that it regards as a fishing
expedition, the Court scraps Conley’s “no set of facts ”
language. Concluding that the phrase has been “ques
tioned, criticized, and explained away long enough,” ante,
at 16, the Court dismisses it as careless composition.
If Conley’s “no set of facts” language is to be interred, let
it not be without a eulogy. That exact language, which the
majority says has “puzzl[ed] the profession for 50 years,”
ibid., has been cited as authority in a dozen opinions of
this Court and four separate writings.4 In not one of those
16 opinions was the language “questioned,” “criticized,” or
“explained away.” Indeed, today’s opinion is the first by
any Member of this Court to express any doubt as to the
adequacy of the Conley formulation. Taking their cues
from the federal courts, 26 States and the District of Co
lumbia utilize as their standard for dismissal of a com
plaint the very language the majority repudiates: whether
it appears “beyond doubt” that “no set of facts” in support
——————
4 SEC v. Zandford, 535 U. S. 813, 818 (2002); Davis v. Monroe County

Bd. of Ed., 526 U. S. 629, 654 (1999); Hartford Fire Ins. Co. v. Califor
nia, 509 U. S. 764, 811 (1993); Brower v. County of Inyo, 489 U. S. 593,
598 (1989); Hughes v. Rowe, 449 U. S. 5, 10 (1980) (per curiam); McLain
v. Real Estate Bd. of New Orleans, Inc., 444 U. S. 232, 246 (1980);
Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U. S. 97, 106 (1976); Hospital Building Co. v.
Trustees of Rex Hospital, 425 U. S. 738, 746 (1976); Scheuer v. Rhodes,
416 U. S. 232, 236 (1974); Cruz v. Beto, 405 U. S. 319, 322 (1972) (per
curiam); Haines v. Kerner, 404 U. S. 519, 521 (1972) (per curiam);
Jenkins v. McKeithen, 395 U. S. 411, 422 (1969) (plurality opinion); see
also Cleveland Bd. of Ed. v. Loudermill, 470 U. S. 532, 554 (1985)
(Brennan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part); Hoover v.
Ronwin, 466 U. S. 558, 587 (1984) (STEVENS, J., dissenting); United Air
Lines, Inc. v. Evans, 431 U. S. 553, 561, n. 1 (1977) (Marshall, J.,
dissenting); Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 426
U. S. 26, 55, n. 6 (1976) (Brennan, J., concurring in judgment).
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 9

STEVENS, J., dissenting

of the claim would entitle the plaintiff to relief.5
——————
5 See, e.g., EB Invs., LLC v. Atlantis Development, Inc., 930 So. 2d

502, 507 (Ala. 2005); Department of Health & Social Servs. v. Native
Village of Curyung, 151 P. 3d 388, 396 (Alaska 2006); Newman v.
Maricopa Cty., 167 Ariz. 501, 503, 808 P. 2d 1253, 1255 (App. 1991);
Public Serv. Co. of Colo. v. Van Wyk, 27 P. 3d 377, 385–386 (Colo. 2001)
(en banc); Clawson v. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, LLC, 906 A. 2d 308, 312
(D. C. 2006); Hillman Constr. Corp. v. Wainer, 636 So. 2d 576, 578 (Fla.
App. 1994); Kaplan v. Kaplan, 266 Ga. 612, 613, 469 S. E. 2d 198, 199
(1996); Wright v. Home Depot U. S. A., 111 Haw. 401, 406, 142 P. 3d
265, 270 (2006); Taylor v. Maile, 142 Idaho 253, 257, 127 P. 3d 156, 160
(2005); Fink v. Bryant, 2001–CC–0987, p. 4 (La. 11/28/01), 801 So. 2d
346, 349; Gagne v. Cianbro Corp., 431 A. 2d 1313, 1318–1319 (Me.
1981); Gasior v. Massachusetts Gen. Hospital, 446 Mass. 645, 647, 846
N. E. 2d 1133, 1135 (2006); Ralph Walker, Inc. v. Gallagher, 926 So. 2d
890, 893 (Miss. 2006); Jones v. Montana Univ. System, 337 Mont. 1, 7,
155 P. 3d 1247, ____ (2007); Johnston v. Nebraska Dept. of Correctional
Servs., 270 Neb. 987, 989, 709 N. W. 2d 321, 324 (2006); Blackjack
Bonding v. Las Vegas Munic. Ct., 116 Nev. 1213, 1217, 14 P. 3d 1275,
1278 (2000); Shepard v. Ocwen Fed. Bank, 361 N. C. 137, 139, 638 S. E.
2d 197, 199 (2006); Rose v. United Equitable Ins. Co., 2001 ND 154,
¶10, 632 N. W. 2d 429, 434; State ex rel. Turner v. Houk, 112 Ohio St.
3d 561, 562, 2007–Ohio–814, ¶5, 862 N. E. 2d 104, 105 (per curiam);
Moneypenney v. Dawson, 2006 OK 53, ¶2, 141 P. 3d 549, 551; Gagnon v.
State, 570 A. 2d 656, 659 (R. I. 1990); Osloond v. Farrier, 2003 SD 28,
¶4, 659 N. W. 2d 20, 22 (per curiam); Smith v. Lincoln Brass Works,
Inc., 712 S. W. 2d 470, 471 (Tenn. 1986); Association of Haystack
Property Owners v. Sprague, 145 Vt. 443, 446, 494 A. 2d 122, 124
(1985); In re Coday, 156 Wash. 2d 485, 497, 130 P. 3d 809, 815 (2006)
(en banc); Haines v. Hampshire Cty. Comm’n, 216 W. Va. 499, 502, 607
S. E. 2d 828, 831 (2004); Warren v. Hart, 747 P. 2d 511, 512 (Wyo.
1987); see also Malpiede v. Townson, 780 A. 2d 1075, 1082–1083 (Del.
2001) (permitting dismissal only “where the court determines with
reasonable certainty that the plaintiff could prevail on no set of facts
that may be inferred from the well-pleaded allegations in the com
plaint” (internal quotation marks omitted)); Canel v. Topinka, 212 Ill.
2d 311, 318, 818 N. E. 2d 311, 317 (2004) (replacing “appears beyond
doubt” in the Conley formulation with “is clearly apparent”); In re
Young, 522 N. E. 2d 386, 388 (Ind. 1988) (per curiam) (replacing “ap
pears beyond doubt” with “appears to a certainty”); Barkema v. Wil
liams Pipeline Co., 666 N. W. 2d 612, 614 (Iowa 2003) (holding that a
motion to dismiss should be sustained “only when there exists no
10 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Petitioners have not requested that the Conley formula
tion be retired, nor have any of the six amici who filed
briefs in support of petitioners. I would not rewrite the
Nation’s civil procedure textbooks and call into doubt the
pleading rules of most of its States without far more in
formed deliberation as to the costs of doing so. Congress
has established a process—a rulemaking process—for
revisions of that order. See 28 U. S. C. §§2072–2074 (2000
ed. and Supp. IV).
Today’s majority calls Conley’s “ ‘no set of facts’ ” lan
guage “an incomplete, negative gloss on an accepted plead
ing standard: once a claim has been stated adequately, it
may be supported by showing any set of facts consistent
with the allegations in the complaint.” Ante, at 16. This
is not and cannot be what the Conley Court meant. First,
as I have explained, and as the Conley Court well knew,
the pleading standard the Federal Rules meant to codify
does not require, or even invite, the pleading of facts.6 The
——————
conceivable set of facts entitling the non-moving party to relief”);
Pioneer Village v. Bullitt Cty., 104 S. W. 3d 757, 759 (Ky. 2003) (holding
that judgment on the pleadings should be granted “if it appears beyond
doubt that the nonmoving party cannot prove any set of facts that
would entitle him/her to relief”); Corley v. Detroit Bd. of Ed., 470 Mich.
274, 277, 681 N. W. 2d 342, 345 (2004) (per curiam) (holding that a
motion for judgment on the pleadings should be granted only “ ‘if no
factual development could possibly justify recovery’ ”); Oberkramer v.
Ellisville, 706 S. W. 2d 440, 441 (Mo. 1986) (en banc) (omitting the
words “beyond doubt” from the Conley formulation); Colman v. Utah
State Land Bd., 795 P. 2d 622, 624 (Utah 1990) (holding that a motion
to dismiss is appropriate “only if it clearly appears that [the plaintiff]
can prove no set of facts in support of his claim”); NRC Management
Servs. Corp. v. First Va. Bank-Southwest, 63 Va. Cir. 68, 70 (2003)
(“The Virginia standard is identical [to the Conley formulation], though
the Supreme Court of Virginia may not have used the same words to
describe it”).
6 The majority is correct to say that what the Federal Rules require is

a “ ‘showing’ ” of entitlement to relief. Ante, at 8, n. 3. Whether and to
what extent that “showing” requires allegations of fact will depend on
the particulars of the claim. For example, had the amended complaint
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 11

STEVENS, J., dissenting

“pleading standard” label the majority gives to what it
reads into the Conley opinion—a statement of the permis
sible factual support for an adequately pleaded com
plaint—would not, therefore, have impressed the Conley
Court itself. Rather, that Court would have understood
the majority’s remodeling of its language to express an
evidentiary standard, which the Conley Court had neither
need nor want to explicate. Second, it is pellucidly clear
that the Conley Court was interested in what a complaint
must contain, not what it may contain. In fact, the Court
said without qualification that it was “appraising the
sufficiency of the complaint.” 355 U. S., at 45 (emphasis
added). It was, to paraphrase today’s majority, describing
“the minimum standard of adequate pleading to govern a
complaint’s survival,” ante, at 16–17.
We can be triply sure as to Conley’s meaning by examin
ing the three Court of Appeals cases the Conley Court
cited as support for the “accepted rule” that “a complaint
should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless
it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set
of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to
relief.” 355 U. S., at 45–46. In the first case, Leimer v.
State Mut. Life Assur. Co. of Worcester, Mass., 108 F. 2d
302 (CA8 1940), the plaintiff alleged that she was the
beneficiary of a life insurance plan and that the insurance
company was wrongfully withholding proceeds from her.
——————
in this case alleged only parallel conduct, it would not have made the
required “showing.” See supra, at 1. Similarly, had the pleadings
contained only an allegation of agreement, without specifying the
nature or object of that agreement, they would have been susceptible to
the charge that they did not provide sufficient notice that the defen
dants may answer intelligently. Omissions of that sort instance the
type of “bareness” with which the Federal Rules are concerned. A
plaintiff’s inability to persuade a district court that the allegations
actually included in her complaint are “plausible” is an altogether
different kind of failing, and one that should not be fatal at the plead
ing stage.
12 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

In reversing the District Court’s grant of the defendant’s
motion to dismiss, the Eighth Circuit noted that court’s
own longstanding rule that, to warrant dismissal, “ ‘it
should appear from the allegations that a cause of action
does not exist, rather than that a cause of action has been
defectively stated.’ ” Id., at 305 (quoting Winget v. Rock-
wood, 69 F. 2d 326, 329 (CA8 1934)).
The Leimer court viewed the Federal Rules—specifically
Rules 8(a)(2), 12(b)(6), 12(e) (motion for a more definite
statement), and 56 (motion for summary judgment)—as
reinforcing the notion that “there is no justification for
dismissing a complaint for insufficiency of statement,
except where it appears to a certainty that the plaintiff
would be entitled to no relief under any state of facts
which could be proved in support of the claim.” 108 F. 2d,
at 306. The court refuted in the strongest terms any
suggestion that the unlikelihood of recovery should deter
mine the fate of a complaint: “No matter how improbable
it may be that she can prove her claim, she is entitled to
an opportunity to make the attempt, and is not required to
accept as final a determination of her rights based upon
inferences drawn in favor of the defendant from her
amended complaint.” Ibid.
The Third Circuit relied on Leimer’s admonition in
Continental Collieries, Inc. v. Shober, 130 F. 2d 631 (1942),
which the Conley Court also cited in support of its “no set
of facts” formulation. In a diversity action the plaintiff
alleged breach of contract, but the District Court dis
missed the complaint on the ground that the contract
appeared to be unenforceable under state law. The Court
of Appeals reversed, concluding that there were facts in
dispute that went to the enforceability of the contract, and
that the rule at the pleading stage was as in Leimer: “No
matter how likely it may seem that the pleader will be
unable to prove his case, he is entitled, upon averring a
claim, to an opportunity to try to prove it.” 130 F. 3d, at
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 13

STEVENS, J., dissenting

635.
The third case the Conley Court cited approvingly was
written by Judge Clark himself. In Dioguardi v. Durning,
139 F. 2d 774 (CA2 1944), the pro se plaintiff, an importer
of “tonics,” charged the customs inspector with auctioning
off the plaintiff’s former merchandise for less than was bid
for it—and indeed for an amount equal to the plaintiff’s
own bid—and complained that two cases of tonics went
missing three weeks before the sale. The inference, hinted
at by the averments but never stated in so many words,
was that the defendant fraudulently denied the plaintiff
his rightful claim to the tonics, which, if true, would have
violated federal law. Writing six years after the adoption
of the Federal Rules he held the lead rein in drafting,
Judge Clark said that the defendant
“could have disclosed the facts from his point of view,
in advance of a trial if he chose, by asking for a pre
trial hearing or by moving for a summary judgment
with supporting affidavits. But, as it stands, we do
not see how the plaintiff may properly be deprived of
his day in court to show what he obviously so firmly
believes and what for present purposes defendant
must be taken as admitting.” Id., at 775.
As any civil procedure student knows, Judge Clark’s opin
ion disquieted the defense bar and gave rise to a move
ment to revise Rule 8 to require a plaintiff to plead a
“ ‘cause of action.’ ” See 5 Wright & Miller §1201, at 86–87.
The movement failed, see ibid.; Dioguardi was explicitly
approved in Conley; and “[i]n retrospect the case itself
seems to be a routine application of principles that are
universally accepted,” 5 Wright & Miller §1220, at 284–
285.
In light of Leimer, Continental Collieries, and
Dioguardi, Conley’s statement that a complaint is not to
be dismissed unless “no set of facts” in support thereof
14 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

would entitle the plaintiff to relief is hardly “puzzling,”
ante, at 16. It reflects a philosophy that, unlike in the
days of code pleading, separating the wheat from the chaff
is a task assigned to the pretrial and trial process.
Conley’s language, in short, captures the policy choice
embodied in the Federal Rules and binding on the federal
courts.
We have consistently reaffirmed that basic understand
ing of the Federal Rules in the half century since Conley.
For example, in Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U. S. 232 (1974),
we reversed the Court of Appeals’ dismissal on the plead
ings when the respondents, the Governor and other offi
cials of the State of Ohio, argued that petitioners’ claims
were barred by sovereign immunity. In a unanimous
opinion by then-Justice Rehnquist, we emphasized that
“[w]hen a federal court reviews the sufficiency of a
complaint, before the reception of any evidence either
by affidavit or admissions, its task is necessarily a
limited one. The issue is not whether a plaintiff will
ultimately prevail but whether the claimant is enti
tled to offer evidence to support the claims. Indeed it
may appear on the face of the pleadings that a recovery
is very remote and unlikely but that is not the test.”
Id., at 236 (emphasis added).
The Rhodes plaintiffs had “alleged generally and in con
clusory terms” that the defendants, by calling out the
National Guard to suppress the Kent State University
student protests, “were guilty of wanton, wilful and negli
gent conduct.” Krause v. Rhodes, 471 F. 2d 430, 433 (CA6
1972). We reversed the Court of Appeals on the ground
that “[w]hatever the plaintiffs may or may not be able to
establish as to the merits of their allegations, their claims,
as stated in the complaints, given the favorable reading
required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” were
not barred by the Eleventh Amendment because they were
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 15

STEVENS, J., dissenting

styled as suits against the defendants in their individual
capacities. 416 U. S., at 238.
We again spoke with one voice against efforts to expand
pleading requirements beyond their appointed limits in
Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and
Coordination Unit, 507 U. S. 163 (1993). Writing for the
unanimous Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist rebuffed the
Fifth Circuit’s effort to craft a standard for pleading mu
nicipal liability that accounted for “the enormous expense
involved today in litigation,” Leatherman v. Tarrant Cty.
Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 954 F. 2d
1054, 1057 (1992) (internal quotation marks omitted), by
requiring a plaintiff to “state with factual detail and par
ticularity the basis for the claim which necessarily in
cludes why the defendant-official cannot successfully
maintain the defense of immunity.” Leatherman, 507
U. S., at 167 (internal quotation marks omitted). We
found this language inconsistent with Rules 8(a)(2) and
9(b) and emphasized that motions to dismiss were not the
place to combat discovery abuse: “In the absence of [an
amendment to Rule 9(b)], federal courts and litigants must
rely on summary judgment and control of discovery to
weed out unmeritorious claims sooner rather than later.”
Id., at 168–169.
Most recently, in Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S. 506, we were
faced with a case more similar to the present one than the
majority will allow. In discrimination cases, our prece
dents require a plaintiff at the summary judgment stage
to produce either direct evidence of discrimination or, if
the claim is based primarily on circumstantial evidence, to
meet the shifting evidentiary burdens imposed under the
framework articulated in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v.
Green, 411 U. S. 792 (1973). See, e.g., Trans World Air
lines, Inc. v. Thurston, 469 U. S. 111, 121 (1985).
Swierkiewicz alleged that he had been terminated on
account of national origin in violation of Title VII of the
16 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Second Circuit dismissed
the suit on the pleadings because he had not pleaded a
prima facie case of discrimination under the McDonnell
Douglas standard.
We reversed in another unanimous opinion, holding that
“under a notice pleading system, it is not appropriate to
require a plaintiff to plead facts establishing a prima facie
case because the McDonnell Douglas framework does not
apply in every employment discrimination case.”
Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 511. We also observed that
Rule 8(a)(2) does not contemplate a court’s passing on the
merits of a litigant’s claim at the pleading stage. Rather,
the “simplified notice pleading standard” of the Federal
Rules “relies on liberal discovery rules and summary
judgment motions to define disputed facts and issues and
to dispose of unmeritorious claims.” Id., at 512; see Brief
for United States et al. as Amici Curiae in Swierkiewicz v.
Sorema N. A., O. T. 2001, No. 00–1853, p. 10 (stating that
a Rule 12(b)(6) motion is not “an appropriate device for
testing the truth of what is asserted or for determining
whether a plaintiff has any evidence to back up what is in
the complaint” (internal quotation marks omitted)).7
As in the discrimination context, we have developed an
evidentiary framework for evaluating claims under §1 of
the Sherman Act when those claims rest on entirely cir
cumstantial evidence of conspiracy. See Matsushita Elec.
Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U. S. 574 (1986).

——————
7 See also 5 Wright & Miller §1202, at 89–90 (“[P]leadings under the

rules simply may be a general summary of the party’s position that is
sufficient to advise the other party of the event being sued upon, to
provide some guidance in a subsequent proceeding as to what was
decided for purposes of res judicata and collateral estoppel, and to
indicate whether the case should be tried to the court or to a jury. No
more is demanded of the pleadings than this; indeed, history shows
that no more can be performed successfully by the pleadings” (footnotes
omitted)).
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 17

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Under Matsushita, a plaintiff’s allegations of an illegal
conspiracy may not, at the summary judgment stage, rest
solely on the inferences that may be drawn from the paral
lel conduct of the defendants. In order to survive a Rule
56 motion, a §1 plaintiff “must present evidence ‘that
tends to exclude the possibility’ that the alleged conspira
tors acted independently.’ ” Id., at 588 (quoting Monsanto
Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp., 465 U. S. 752, 764 (1984)).
That is, the plaintiff “must show that the inference of
conspiracy is reasonable in light of the competing infer
ences of independent action or collusive action.” 475 U. S.,
at 588.
Everything today’s majority says would therefore make
perfect sense if it were ruling on a Rule 56 motion for
summary judgment and the evidence included nothing
more than the Court has described. But it should go
without saying in the wake of Swierkiewicz that a height
ened production burden at the summary judgment stage
does not translate into a heightened pleading burden at
the complaint stage. The majority rejects the complaint in
this case because—in light of the fact that the parallel
conduct alleged is consistent with ordinary market behav
ior—the claimed conspiracy is “conceivable” but not “plau
sible,” ante, at 24. I have my doubts about the majority’s
assessment of the plausibility of this alleged conspiracy.
See Part III, infra. But even if the majority’s speculation
is correct, its “plausibility” standard is irreconcilable with
Rule 8 and with our governing precedents. As we made
clear in Swierkiewicz and Leatherman, fear of the burdens
of litigation does not justify factual conclusions supported
only by lawyers’ arguments rather than sworn denials or
admissible evidence.
This case is a poor vehicle for the Court’s new pleading
rule, for we have observed that “in antitrust cases, where
‘the proof is largely in the hands of the alleged conspira
tors,’ . . . dismissals prior to giving the plaintiff ample
18 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

opportunity for discovery should be granted very spar
ingly.” Hospital Building Co. v. Trustees of Rex Hospital,
425 U. S. 738, 746 (1976) (quoting Poller v. Columbia
Broadcasting System, Inc., 368 U. S. 464, 473 (1962)); see
also Knuth v. Erie-Crawford Dairy Cooperative Assn., 395
F. 2d 420, 423 (CA3 1968) (“The ‘liberal’ approach to the
consideration of antitrust complaints is important because
inherent in such an action is the fact that all the details
and specific facts relied upon cannot properly be set forth
as part of the pleadings”). Moreover, the fact that the
Sherman Act authorizes the recovery of treble damages
and attorney’s fees for successful plaintiffs indicates that
Congress intended to encourage, rather than discourage,
private enforcement of the law. See Radovich v. National
Football League, 352 U. S. 445, 454 (1957) (“Congress
itself has placed the private antitrust litigant in a most
favorable position . . . . In the face of such a policy this
Court should not add requirements to burden the private
litigant beyond what is specifically set forth by Congress
in those laws”). It is therefore more, not less, important in
antitrust cases to resist the urge to engage in armchair
economics at the pleading stage.
The same year we decided Conley, Judge Clark wrote,
presciently,
“I fear that every age must learn its lesson that spe
cial pleading cannot be made to do the service of trial
and that live issues between active litigants are not to
be disposed of or evaded on the paper pleadings, i.e.,
the formalistic claims of the parties. Experience has
found no quick and easy short cut for trials in cases
generally and antitrust cases in particular.” Special
Pleading in the “Big Case”? in Procedure—The
Handmaid of Justice 147, 148 (C. Wright & H. Rea
soner eds. 1965) (hereinafter Clark, Special Pleading
in the Big Case) (emphasis added).
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 19

STEVENS, J., dissenting

In this “Big Case,” the Court succumbs to the temptation
that previous Courts have steadfastly resisted.8 While the
majority assures us that it is not applying any “ ‘height
ened’ ” pleading standard, see ante, at 23, n. 14, I shall
now explain why I have a difficult time understanding its
opinion any other way.
III
The Court does not suggest that an agreement to do
what the plaintiffs allege would be permissible under the
antitrust laws, see, e.g., Associated Gen. Contractors of
Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 526–527 (1983).
Nor does the Court hold that these plaintiffs have failed to
allege an injury entitling them to sue for damages under
those laws, see Brunswick Corp. v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat,
Inc., 429 U. S. 477, 489–490 (1977). Rather, the theory on
——————
8 Our decision in Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, 544 U. S. 336

(2005), is not to the contrary. There, the plaintiffs failed adequately to
allege loss causation, a required element in a private securities fraud
action. Because it alleged nothing more than that the prices of the
securities the plaintiffs purchased were artificially inflated, the Dura
complaint failed to “provide the defendants with notice of what the
relevant economic loss might be or of what the causal connection might
be between that loss and the [alleged] misrepresentation.” Id., at 347.
Here, the failure the majority identifies is not a failure of notice—which
“notice pleading” rightly condemns—but rather a failure to satisfy the
Court that the agreement alleged might plausibly have occurred. That
being a question not of notice but of proof, it should not be answered
without first hearing from the defendants (as apart from their lawyers).
Similarly, in Associated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters,
459 U. S. 519 (1983), in which we also found an antitrust complaint
wanting, the problem was not that the injuries the plaintiffs alleged
failed to satisfy some threshold of plausibility, but rather that the
injuries as alleged were not “the type that the antitrust statute was
intended to forestall.” Id., at 540; see id., at 526 (“As the case comes to
us, we must assume that the Union can prove the facts alleged in its
amended complaint. It is not, however, proper to assume that the
Union can prove facts that it has not alleged or that the defendants
have violated the antitrust laws in ways that have not been alleged”).
20 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

which the Court permits dismissal is that, so far as the
Federal Rules are concerned, no agreement has been
alleged at all. This is a mind-boggling conclusion.
As the Court explains, prior to the enactment of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 the law prohibited the
defendants from competing with each other. The new
statute was enacted to replace a monopolistic market with
a competitive one. The Act did not merely require the
regional monopolists to take affirmative steps to facilitate
entry to new competitors, see Verizon Communications
Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, 540 U. S. 398,
402 (2004); it also permitted the existing firms to compete
with each other and to expand their operations into previ
ously forbidden territory. See 47 U. S. C. §271. Each of
the defendants decided not to take the latter step. That
was obviously an extremely important business decision,
and I am willing to presume that each company acted
entirely independently in reaching that decision. I am
even willing to entertain the majority’s belief that any
agreement among the companies was unlikely. But the
plaintiffs allege in three places in their complaint, ¶¶ 4,
51, 64, App. 11, 27, 30, that the ILECs did in fact agree
both to prevent competitors from entering into their local
markets and to forgo competition with each other. And as
the Court recognizes, at the motion to dismiss stage, a
judge assumes “that all the allegations in the complaint
are true (even if doubtful in fact).” Ante, at 8–9.
The majority circumvents this obvious obstacle to dis
missal by pretending that it does not exist. The Court
admits that “in form a few stray statements in the com
plaint speak directly of agreement,” but disregards those
allegations by saying that “on fair reading these are
merely legal conclusions resting on the prior allegations”
of parallel conduct. Ante, at 18. The Court’s dichotomy
between factual allegations and “legal conclusions” is the
stuff of a bygone era, supra, at 5–7. That distinction was a
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 21

STEVENS, J., dissenting

defining feature of code pleading, see generally Clark, The
Complaint in Code Pleading, 35 Yale L. J. 259 (1925–
1926), but was conspicuously abolished when the Federal
Rules were enacted in 1938. See United States v. Employ
ing Plasterers Assn. of Chicago, 347 U. S. 186, 188 (1954)
(holding, in an antitrust case, that the Government’s
allegations of effects on interstate commerce must be
taken into account in deciding whether to dismiss the
complaint “[w]hether these charges be called ‘allegations
of fact’ or ‘mere conclusions of the pleader’ ”); Brownlee v.
Conine, 957 F. 2d 353, 354 (CA7 1992) (“The Federal Rules
of Civil Procedure establish a system of notice pleading
rather than of fact pleading, . . . so the happenstance that
a complaint is ‘conclusory,’ whatever exactly that overused
lawyers’ cliché means, does not automatically condemn
it”); Walker Distributing Co. v. Lucky Lager Brewing Co.,
323 F. 2d 1, 3–4 (CA9 1963) (“[O]ne purpose of Rule 8 was
to get away from the highly technical distinction between
statements of fact and conclusions of law . . .”); Oil, Chemi
cal & Atomic Workers Int’l Union v. Delta, 277 F. 2d 694,
697 (CA6 1960) (“Under the notice system of pleading
established by the Rules of Civil Procedure, . . . the an
cient distinction between pleading ‘facts’ and ‘conclusions’
is no longer significant”); 5 Wright & Miller §1218, at 267
(“[T]he federal rules do not prohibit the pleading of facts or
legal conclusions as long as fair notice is given to the
parties”). “Defendants entered into a contract” is no more
a legal conclusion than “defendant negligently drove,” see
Form 9; supra, at 6. Indeed it is less of one.9
——————
9 The Court suggests that the allegation of an agreement, even if

credited, might not give the notice required by Rule 8 because it lacks
specificity. Ante, at 18–19, n. 10. The remedy for an allegation lacking
sufficient specificity to provide adequate notice is, of course, a Rule
12(e) motion for a more definite statement. See Swierkiewicz v. Sorema
N. A., 534 U. S. 506, 514 (2002). Petitioners made no such motion and
indeed have conceded that “[o]ur problem with the current complaint is
22 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Even if I were inclined to accept the Court’s anachronis
tic dichotomy and ignore the complaint’s actual allega
tions, I would dispute the Court’s suggestion that any
inference of agreement from petitioners’ parallel conduct
is “implausible.” Many years ago a truly great economist
perceptively observed that “[p]eople of the same trade
seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,
but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” A. Smith,
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, in 39 Great Books of the Western World 55 (R.
Hutchins & M. Adler eds. 1952). I am not so cynical as to
accept that sentiment at face value, but I need not do so
here. Respondents’ complaint points not only to petition
ers’ numerous opportunities to meet with each other,
Complaint ¶46, App. 23,10 but also to Notebaert’s curious
statement that encroaching on a fellow incumbent’s terri
tory “might be a good way to turn a quick dollar but that
doesn’t make it right,” id., ¶42, App. 22. What did he
mean by that? One possible (indeed plausible) inference is
that he meant that while it would be in his company’s
——————
not a lack of specificity, it’s quite specific.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 14. Thus,
the fact that “the pleadings mentioned no specific time, place, or per
sons involved in the alleged conspiracies,” ante, at 18, n. 10, is, for our
purposes, academic.
10 The Court describes my reference to the allegation that the defen

dants belong to various trade associations as “playfully” suggesting that
the defendants conspired to restrain trade. Ante, at 20, n. 12. Quite
the contrary: an allegation that competitors meet on a regular basis,
like the allegations of parallel conduct, is consistent with—though not
sufficient to prove—the plaintiffs’ entirely serious and unequivocal
allegation that the defendants entered into an unlawful agreement.
Indeed, if it were true that the plaintiffs “rest their §1 claim on descrip
tions of parallel conduct and not on any independent allegation of
actual agreement among the ILECs,” ante, at 18, there would have
been no purpose in including a reference to the trade association
meetings in the amended complaint.
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 23

STEVENS, J., dissenting

economic self-interest to compete with its brethren, he had
agreed with his competitors not to do so. According to the
complaint, that is how the Illinois Coalition for Competi
tive Telecom construed Notebaert’s statement, id., ¶44,
App. 22 (calling the statement “evidence of potential collu
sion among regional Bell phone monopolies to not compete
against one another and kill off potential competitors in
local phone service”), and that is how Members of Con
gress construed his company’s behavior, id., ¶45, App. 23
(describing a letter to the Justice Department requesting
an investigation into the possibility that the ILECs’ “very
apparent non-competition policy” was coordinated).
Perhaps Notebaert meant instead that competition
would be sensible in the short term but not in the long
run. That’s what his lawyers tell us anyway. See Brief for
Petitioners 36. But I would think that no one would know
better what Notebaert meant than Notebaert himself.
Instead of permitting respondents to ask Notebaert, how
ever, the Court looks to other quotes from that and other
articles and decides that what he meant was that entering
new markets as a CLEC would not be a “ ‘sustainable
economic model.’ ” Ante, at 22, n. 13. Never mind that—as
anyone ever interviewed knows—a newspaper article is
hardly a verbatim transcript; the writer selects quotes to
package his story, not to record a subject’s views for pos
terity. But more importantly the District Court was re
quired at this stage of the proceedings to construe Note
baert’s ambiguous statement in the plaintiffs’ favor.11 See
——————
11 Itis ironic that the Court seeks to justify its decision to draw fac
tual inferences in the defendants’ favor at the pleading stage by citing
to a rule of evidence, ante, at 22, n. 13. Under Federal Rule of Evidence
201(b), a judicially noticed fact “must be one not subject to reasonable
dispute in that it is either (1) generally known within the territorial
jurisdiction of the trial court or (2) capable of accurate and ready
determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably
be questioned.” Whether Notebaert’s statements constitute evidence of
24 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737, 768, n. 1 (1984). The infer
ence the statement supports—that simultaneous decisions
by ILECs not even to attempt to poach customers from one
another once the law authorized them to do so were the
product of an agreement—sits comfortably within the
realm of possibility. That is all the Rules require.
To be clear, if I had been the trial judge in this case, I
would not have permitted the plaintiffs to engage in mas
sive discovery based solely on the allegations in this com
plaint. On the other hand, I surely would not have dis
missed the complaint without requiring the defendants to
answer the charge that they “have agreed not to compete
with one another and otherwise allocated customers and
markets to one another.”12 ¶51, App. 27. Even a sworn
denial of that charge would not justify a summary dis
missal without giving the plaintiffs the opportunity to
take depositions from Notebaert and at least one responsi
ble executive representing each of the other defendants.
Respondents in this case proposed a plan of “ ‘phased
discovery’ ” limited to the existence of the alleged conspir
acy and class certification. Brief for Respondents 25–26.
Two petitioners rejected the plan. Ibid. Whether or not
respondents’ proposed plan was sensible, it was an appro
priate subject for negotiation.13 Given the charge in the
——————
a conspiracy is hardly beyond reasonable dispute.
12 The Court worries that a defendant seeking to respond to this “con

clusory” allegation “would have little idea where to begin.” Ante, at 19,
n. 10. A defendant could, of course, begin by either denying or admit
ting the charge.
13 The potential for “sprawling, costly, and hugely time-consuming”

discovery, ante, at 13, n. 6, is no reason to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. The Court vastly underestimates a district court’s case-
management arsenal. Before discovery even begins, the court may
grant a defendant’s Rule 12(e) motion; Rule 7(a) permits a trial court to
order a plaintiff to reply to a defendant’s answer, see Crawford-El v.
Britton, 523 U. S. 574, 598 (1998); and Rule 23 requires “rigorous
analysis” to ensure that class certification is appropriate, General
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 25

STEVENS, J., dissenting

complaint—buttressed by the common sense of Adam
——————
Telephone Co. of Southwest v. Falcon, 457 U. S. 147, 160 (1982); see
In re Initial Public Offering Securities Litigation, 471 F. 3d 24 (CA2
2006) (holding that a district court may not certify a class without
ruling that each Rule 23 requirement is met, even if a requirement
overlaps with a merits issue). Rule 16 invests a trial judge with the
power, backed by sanctions, to regulate pretrial proceedings via confer
ences and scheduling orders, at which the parties may discuss, inter
alia, “the elimination of frivolous claims or defenses,” Rule 16(c)(1); “the
necessity or desirability of amendments to the pleadings,” Rule 16(c)(2);
“the control and scheduling of discovery,” Rule 16(c)(6); and “the need
for adopting special procedures for managing potentially difficult or
protracted actions that may involve complex issues, multiple parties,
difficult legal questions, or unusual proof problems,” Rule 16(c)(12).
Subsequently, Rule 26 confers broad discretion to control the combina
tion of interrogatories, requests for admissions, production requests,
and depositions permitted in a given case; the sequence in which such
discovery devices may be deployed; and the limitations imposed upon
them. See 523 U. S., at 598–599. Indeed, Rule 26(c) specifically per
mits a court to take actions “to protect a party or person from annoy
ance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense” by, for
example, disallowing a particular discovery request, setting appropriate
terms and conditions, or limiting its scope.
In short, the Federal Rules contemplate that pretrial matters will
be settled through a flexible process of give and take, of proffers,
stipulations, and stonewalls, not by having trial judges screen allega
tions for their plausibility vel non without requiring an answer from the
defendant. See Societe Internationale pour Participations Industrielles
et Commerciales, S. A. v. Rogers, 357 U. S. 197, 206 (1958) (“Rule 34 is
sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the exigencies of particular litiga
tion”). And should it become apparent over the course of litigation that
a plaintiff’s filings bespeak an in terrorem suit, the district court has at
its call its own in terrorem device, in the form of a wide array of Rule 11
sanctions. See Rules 11(b), (c) (authorizing sanctions if a suit is pre
sented “for any improper purpose, such as to harass or to cause unnec
essary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation”); see Business
Guides, Inc. v. Chromatic Communications Enterprises, Inc., 498 U. S.
533 (1991) (holding that Rule 11 applies to a represented party who
signs a pleading, motion, or other papers, as well as to attorneys);
Atkins v. Fischer, 232 F. R. D. 116, 126 (DC 2005) (“As possible sanc
tions pursuant to Rule 11, the court has an arsenal of options at its
disposal”).
26 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Smith—I cannot say that the possibility that joint discus
sions and perhaps some agreements played a role in peti
tioners’ decisionmaking process is so implausible that
dismissing the complaint before any defendant has denied
the charge is preferable to granting respondents even a
minimal opportunity to prove their claims. See Clark,
New Federal Rules 977 (“[T]hrough the weapons of discov
ery and summary judgment we have developed new de
vices, with more appropriate penalties to aid in matters of
proof, and do not need to force the pleadings to their less
appropriate function”).
I fear that the unfortunate result of the majority’s new
pleading rule will be to invite lawyers’ debates over eco
nomic theory to conclusively resolve antitrust suits in the
absence of any evidence. It is no surprise that the anti
trust defense bar—among whom “lament” as to inade
quate judicial supervision of discovery is most “common,”
see ante, at 12—should lobby for this state of affairs. But
“we must recall that their primary responsibility is to win
cases for their clients, not to improve law administration
for the public.” Clark, Special Pleading in the Big Case
152. As we did in our prior decisions, we should have
instructed them that their remedy was to seek to amend
the Federal Rules—not our interpretation of them.14 See
——————
14 Given his “background in antitrust law,” ante, at 13, n. 6, Judge

Easterbrook has recognized that the most effective solution to discovery
abuse lies in the legislative and rulemaking arenas. He has suggested
that the remedy for the ills he complains of requires a revolution in the
rules of civil procedure:
“Perhaps a system in which judges pare away issues and focus on
investigation is too radical to contemplate in this country—although it
prevailed here before 1938, when the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
were adopted. The change could not be accomplished without abandon
ing notice pleading, increasing the number of judicial officers, and
giving them more authority . . . . If we are to rule out judge-directed
discovery, however, we must be prepared to pay the piper. Part of the
price is the high cost of unnecessary discovery—impositional and
 Cite as: 550 U. S. ____ (2007) 27

STEVENS, J., dissenting

Swierkiewicz, 534 U. S., at 515; Crawford-El v. Britton,
523 U. S. 574, 595 (1998); Leatherman, 507 U. S., at 168.
IV
Just a few weeks ago some of my colleagues explained
that a strict interpretation of the literal text of statutory
language is essential to avoid judicial decisions that are
not faithful to the intent of Congress. Zuni Public School
Dist. No. 89 v. Department of Education, 550 U. S. ___, ___
(2007) (SCALIA, J., dissenting). I happen to believe that
there are cases in which other tools of construction are
more reliable than text, but I agree of course that congres
sional intent should guide us in matters of statutory in
terpretation. Id., at ___ (STEVENS, J., concurring). This is
a case in which the intentions of the drafters of three
important sources of law—the Sherman Act, the Tele
communications Act of 1996, and the Federal Rules of
Civil Procedure—all point unmistakably in the same
direction, yet the Court marches resolutely the other way.
Whether the Court’s actions will benefit only defendants
in antitrust treble-damages cases, or whether its test for
the sufficiency of a complaint will inure to the benefit of
all civil defendants, is a question that the future will
answer. But that the Court has announced a significant
new rule that does not even purport to respond to any
congressional command is glaringly obvious.
The transparent policy concern that drives the decision
is the interest in protecting antitrust defendants—who in
this case are some of the wealthiest corporations in our
economy—from the burdens of pretrial discovery. Ante, at
11–13. Even if it were not apparent that the legal fees
petitioners have incurred in arguing the merits of their
Rule 12(b) motion have far exceeded the cost of limited
discovery, or that those discovery costs would burden
——————

otherwise.” Discovery as Abuse, 69 B. U. L. Rev. 635, 645 (1989).

28 BELL ATLANTIC CORP. v. TWOMBLY

STEVENS, J., dissenting

respondents as well as petitioners,15 that concern would
not provide an adequate justification for this law-changing
decision. For in the final analysis it is only a lack of confi
dence in the ability of trial judges to control discovery,
buttressed by appellate judges’ independent appraisal of
the plausibility of profoundly serious factual allegations,
that could account for this stark break from precedent.
If the allegation of conspiracy happens to be true, to
day’s decision obstructs the congressional policy favoring
competition that undergirds both the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 and the Sherman Act itself. More importantly,
even if there is abundant evidence that the allegation is
untrue, directing that the case be dismissed without even
looking at any of that evidence marks a fundamental—and
unjustified—change in the character of pretrial practice.
Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

——————
15 Itwould be quite wrong, of course, to assume that dismissal of an
antitrust case after discovery is costless to plaintiffs. See Fed. Rule
Civ. Proc. 54(d)(1) (“[C]osts other than attorneys’ fees shall be allowed
as of course to the prevailing party unless the court otherwise directs”).