Reflections on Iqbal: Discerning Its Rule, Grappling with Its Implications
Friday, March 26, 2010, Penn State University, The Dickinson School of Law

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Mark R. Brown writes in Qualified Immunity and Interlocutory Fact-Finding in the Courts of Appeals:

In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009), the Court held that a district court decision denying defendants’ motion to dismiss “turned on an issue of law and rejected the defense of qualified immunity,” and was therefore immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine that has been applied to purely legal questions tied into denials of qualified immunity.  See Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511 (1985). The Supreme Court in Iqbal rejected the plaintiff’s contention that “a qualified immunity appeal based solely on the complaint’s failure to state a claim”—rather than on the “ultimate” qualified immunity issue whether the acts allegedly committed by the defendants constituted a violation of clearly established law—“is not a proper subject of interlocutory jurisdiction.”  “[A]ppellate jurisdiction is not so strictly confined,” the Court concluded.

The Court distinguished its previous decision in Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304 (1995), noting that “[t]he concerns that animated the decision in Johnson are absent when an appellate court considers the disposition of a motion to dismiss a complaint for insufficient pleadings.”  Although the Iqbal Court acknowledged that “the categories of ‘fact-based’ and ‘abstract’ legal questions used to guide the Court’s decision in Johnson are not well defined,” it thought that the decision to deny the defendants’ motion to dismiss “falls well within the latter class.”  The Court reasoned that the case required an appellate court to “consider[] only the allegations contained within the four corners of [the plaintiff’s] complaint,” and that the decision whether a complaint “has the ‘heft’ to state a claim is a task well within an appellate court’s core competency.”  “Evaluating the sufficiency of a complaint is not a ‘fact-based’ question of law,” the Iqbal Court concluded, and therefore “the problem the Court sought to avoid in Johnson is not implicated here.” [keep reading]