John Dioguardi, of Brooklyn, N. Y., pro se.

Marvin M. Notkins, Asst. U. S. Atty., of New York City (James B. M. McNally, U. S. Atty., of New York City, on the brief), for defendant-appellee.

Before SWAN, AUGUSTUS N. HAND, and CLARK, Circuit Judges

CLARK, Circuit Judge.

In his complaint, obviously home drawn, plaintiff attempts to assert a series of grievances against the Collector of Customs at the Port of New York growing out of his endeavors to import merchandise from Italy "of great value," consisting of bottles of "tonics." We may pass certain of his claims as either inadequate or inadequately stated and consider only these two: (1) that on the auction day, October 9, 1940, when defendant sold the merchandise at "public custom," "he sold my merchandise to another bidder with my price of $110, and not of his price of $120," and (2) "that three weeks before the sale, two cases, of 19 bottles each case, disappeared." Plaintiff does not make wholly clear how these goods came into the collector's hands, since he alleges compliance with the revenue laws; but he does say he made a claim for "refund of merchandise which was two-thirds paid in Milano, Italy," and that the collector denied the claim. These and other circumstances alleged indicate (what, indeed, plaintiff's brief asserts) that his original dispute was with his consignor as to whether anything more was due upon the merchandise, and that the collector, having held it for a year (presumably as unclaimed merchandise under 19 U.S.C.A. § 1491), then sold it, or such part of it as was left, at public auction. For his asserted injuries plaintiff claimed $5,000 damages, together with interest and costs, against the defendant individually and as collector. This complaint was dismissed by the District Court, with leave, however, to plaintiff to amend, on motion of the United States Attorney, appearing for the defendant, on the ground that it "fails to state facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action."

[775] Thereupon plaintiff filed an amended complaint, wherein, with an obviously heightened conviction that he was being unjustly treated, he vigorously reiterates his claims, including those quoted above and now stated as that his "medicinal extracts" were given to the Springdale Distilling Company "with my betting [bidding?] price of $110: and not their price of $120," and "It isnt so easy to do away with two cases with 37 bottles of one quart. Being protected, they can take this chance." An earlier paragraph suggests that defendant had explained the loss of the two cases by "saying that they had leaked, which could never be true in the mauner they were bottled." On defendant's motion for dismissal on the same ground as before, the court made a final judgment dismissing the complaint, and plaintiff now comes to us with increased volubility, if not clarity.

It would seem, however, that he has stated enough to withstand a mere formal motion, directed only to the face of the complaint, and that here is another instance of judicial haste which in the long run makes waste. Under the new rules of civil procedure, there is no pleading requirement of stating "facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action," but only that there be "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief," Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, rule 8(a), 28 U.S.C.A. following section 723c; and the motion for dismissal under Rule 12(b) is for failure to state "a claim upon which relief can be granted." The District Court does not state why it concluded that the complaints showed no claim upon which relief could be granted; and the United States Attorney's brief before us does not help us, for it is limited to the prognostication — unfortunately ill founded so far as we are concerned — that "the most cursory examination" of them will show the correctness of the District Court's action.

We think that, however inartistically they may be stated, the plaintiff has disclosed his claims that the collector has converted or otherwise done away with two of his cases of medicinal tonics and has sold the rest in a manner incompatible with the public auction he had announced — and, indeed, required by 19 U.S.C.A. § 1491, above cited, and the Treasury Regulations promulgated under it, formerly 19 CFR 18.7-18.12, now 19 CFR 20.5, 8 Fed. Reg. 8407, 8408, June 19, 1943. As to this latter claim, it may be that the collector's only error is a failure to collect an additional ten dollars from the Spring dale Distilling Company; but giving the plaintiff the benefit of reasonable intendments in his allegations (as we must on this motion), the claim appears to be in effect that he was actually the first bidder at the price for which they were sold, and hence was entitled to the merchandise. Of course, defendant did not need to move on the complaint alone; he 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. It appears to be well settled that the collector may be held personally for a default or for negligence in the performance of his duties. Conklin v. Newton, 2 Cir., 34 F.2d 612, 614; Giles v. Newton, D.C.E.D.N.Y., 21 F.2d 484, 488; De Lima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 1, 177-180, 21 S.Ct. 743, 45 L.Ed. 1041; cf. Hammond-Knowlton v. United States, 2 Cir., 121 F.2d 192, certiorari denied 314 U.S. 694, 62 S.Ct. 410, 86 L.Ed. 555.

On remand, the District Court may find substance in other claims asserted by plaintiff, which include a failure properly to catalogue the items (as the cited Regulations provide), or to allow plaintiff to buy at a discount from the catalogue price just before the auction sale (a claim whose basis is not apparent), and a violation of an agreement to deliver the merchandise to the plaintiff as soon as he paid for it, by stopping the payments. In view of plaintiff's limited ability to write and speak English, it will be difficult for the District Court to arrive at justice unless he consents to receive legal assistance in the presentation of his case. The record indicates that he refused further help from a lawyer suggested by the court, and his brief (which was a recital of facts, rather than an argument of law) shows distrust of a lawyer of standing at this bar. It is the plaintiff's privilege to decline all legal help, United States v. Mitchell, 2 Cir., 137 F.2d 1006, 1010, 1011; but we fear that he will be indeed ill advised to attempt to meet a motion for summary judgment or other similar presentation of [776] the merits without competent advice and assistance.

Judgment is reversed and the action is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT.

[42] Joseph C. Waddy argued the cause for petitioners. With him on the brief were Roberson L. King, Robert L. Carter, William C. Gardner and William B. Bryant.

Edward J. Hickey, Jr. argued the cause for respondents. With him on the brief was Clarence M. Mulholland.

MR. JUSTICE BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.

Once again Negro employees are here under the Railway Labor Act^[1] asking that their collective bargaining agent be compelled to represent them fairly. In a series of cases beginning with Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co., 323 U. S. 192, this Court has emphatically and repeatedly ruled that an exclusive bargaining agent under the Railway Labor Act is obligated to represent all employees in the bargaining unit fairly and without discrimination because of race and has held that the courts have power to protect employees against such invidious discrimination.^[2]

This class suit was brought in a Federal District Court in Texas by certain Negro members of the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, petitioners here, on behalf of themselves and other Negro employees similarly situated against the Brotherhood, its Local Union No. 28 and certain officers of both. In summary, the complaint [43] made the following allegations relevant to our decision: Petitioners were employees of the Texas and New Orleans Railroad at its Houston Freight House. Local 28 of the Brotherhood was the designated bargaining agent under the Railway Labor Act for the bargaining unit to which petitioners belonged. A contract existed between the Union and the Railroad which gave the employees in the bargaining unit certain protection from discharge and loss of seniority. In May 1954, the Railroad purported to abolish 45 jobs held by petitioners or other Negroes all of whom were either discharged or demoted. In truth the 45 jobs were not abolished at all but instead filled by whites as the Negroes were ousted, except for a few instances where Negroes were rehired to fill their old jobs but with loss of seniority. Despite repeated pleas by petitioners, the Union, acting according to plan, did nothing to protect them against these discriminatory discharges and refused to give them protection comparable to that given white employees. The complaint then went on to allege that the Union had failed in general to represent Negro employees equally and in good faith. It charged that such discrimination constituted a violation of petitioners' right under the Railway Labor Act to fair representation from their bargaining agent. And it concluded by asking for relief in the nature of declaratory judgment, injunction and damages.

The respondents appeared and moved to dismiss the complaint on several grounds: (1) the National Railroad Adjustment Board had exclusive jurisdiction over the controversy; (2) the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, which had not been joined, was an indispensable party defendant; and (3) the complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief could be given. The District Court granted the motion to dismiss holding that Congress had given the Adjustment Board exclusive jurisdiction over [44] the controversy. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, apparently relying on the same ground, affirmed. 229 F. 2d 436. Since the case raised an important question concerning the protection of employee rights under the Railway Labor Act we granted certiorari. 352 U. S. 818.

We hold that it was error for the courts below to dismiss the complaint for lack of jurisdiction. They took the position that § 3 First (i) of the Railway Labor Act conferred exclusive jurisdiction on the Adjustment Board because the case, in their view, involved the interpretation and application of the collective bargaining agreement. But § 3 First (i) by its own terms applies only to "disputes between an employee or group of employees and a carrier or carriers."^[3] This case involves no dispute between employee and employer but to the contrary is a suit by employees against the bargaining agent to enforce their statutory right not to be unfairly discriminated against by it in bargaining.^[4] The Adjustment Board has no [45] power under § 3 First (i) or any other provision of the Act to protect them from such discrimination. Furthermore, the contract between the Brotherhood and the Railroad will be, at most, only incidentally involved in resolving this controversy between petitioners and their bargaining agent.

Although the District Court did not pass on the other reasons advanced for dismissal of the complaint we think it timely and proper for us to consider them here. They have been briefed and argued by both parties and the respondents urge that the decision below be upheld, if necessary, on these other grounds.

As in the courts below, respondents contend that the Texas and New Orleans Railroad Company is an indispensable party which the petitioners have failed to join as a defendant. On the basis of the allegations made in the complaint and the relief demanded by petitioners we believe that contention is unjustifiable. We cannot see how the Railroad's rights or interests will be affected by this action to enforce the duty of the bargaining representative to represent petitioners fairly. This is not a suit, directly or indirectly, against the Railroad. No relief is asked from it and there is no prospect that any will or can be granted which will bind it. If an issue does develop which necessitates joining the Railroad either it or the respondents will then have an adequate opportunity to request joinder.

Turning to respondents' final ground, we hold that under the general principles laid down in the Steele, Graham, and Howard cases the complaint adequately set forth a claim upon which relief could be granted. 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 [46] in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.^[5] Here, the complaint alleged, in part, that petitioners were discharged wrongfully by the Railroad and that the Union, acting according to plan, refused to protect their jobs as it did those of white employees or to help them with their grievances all because they were Negroes. If these allegations are proven there has been a manifest breach of the Union's statutory duty to represent fairly and without hostile discrimination all of the employees in the bargaining unit. This Court squarely held in Steele and subsequent cases that discrimination in representation because of race is prohibited by the Railway Labor Act. The bargaining representative's duty not to draw "irrelevant and invidious"^[6] distinctions among those it represents does not come to an abrupt end, as the respondents seem to contend, with the making of an agreement between union and employer. Collective bargaining is a continuing process. Among other things, it involves day-to-day adjustments in the contract and other working rules, resolution of new problems not covered by existing agreements, and the protection of employee rights already secured by contract. The bargaining representative can no more unfairly discriminate in carrying out these functions than it can in negotiating a collective agreement.^[7] A contract may be fair and impartial on its face yet administered in such a way, with the active or tacit consent of the union, as to be flagrantly discriminatory against some members of the bargaining unit.

[47] The respondents point to the fact that under the Railway Labor Act aggrieved employees can file their own grievances with the Adjustment Board or sue the employer for breach of contract. Granting this, it still furnishes no sanction for the Union's alleged discrimination in refusing to represent petitioners. The Railway Labor Act, in an attempt to aid collective action by employees, conferred great power and protection on the bargaining agent chosen by a majority of them. As individuals or small groups the employees cannot begin to possess the bargaining power of their representative in negotiating with the employer or in presenting their grievances to him. Nor may a minority choose another agent to bargain in their behalf. We need not pass on the Union's claim that it was not obliged to handle any grievances at all because we are clear that once it undertook to bargain or present grievances for some of the employees it represented it could not refuse to take similar action in good faith for other employees just because they were Negroes.

The respondents also argue that the complaint failed to set forth specific facts to support its general allegations of discrimination and that its dismissal is therefore proper. The decisive answer to this is that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not require a claimant to set out in detail the facts upon which he bases his claim. To the contrary, all the Rules require is "a short and plain statement of the claim"^[8] that will give the defendant fair notice of what the plaintiff's claim is and the grounds upon which it rests. The illustrative forms appended to the Rules plainly demonstrate this. Such simplified "notice pleading" is made possible by the liberal opportunity for discovery and the other pretrial procedures [48] established by the Rules to disclose more precisely the basis of both claim and defense and to define more narrowly the disputed facts and issues.^[9] Following the simple guide of Rule 8 (f) that "all pleadings shall be so construed as to do substantial justice," we have no doubt that petitioners' complaint adequately set forth a claim and gave the respondents fair notice of its basis. The Federal Rules reject the approach that pleading is a game of skill in which one misstep by counsel may be decisive to the outcome and accept the principle that the purpose of pleading is to facilitate a proper decision on the merits. Cf. Maty v. Grasselli Chemical Co., 303 U. S. 197.

The judgment is reversed and the cause is remanded to the District Court for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

[1] 44 Stat. 577, as amended, 45 U. S. C. § 151 et seq.

[2] Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen, 323 U. S. 210; Graham v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen, 338 U. S. 232; Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen v. Howard, 343 U. S. 768. Cf. Wallace Corp. v. Labor Board, 323 U. S. 248; Syres v. Oil Workers International Union, 350 U. S. 892.

[3]In full, § 3 First (i) reads:

"The disputes between an employee or group of employees and a carrier or carriers growing out of grievances or out of the interpretation or application of agreements concerning rates of pay, rules, or working conditions, including cases pending and unadjusted on the date of approval of this Act [June 21, 1934], shall be handled in the usual manner up to and including the chief operating officer of the carrier designated to handle such disputes; but, failing to reach an adjustment in this manner, the disputes may be referred by petition of the parties or by either party to the appropriate division of the Adjustment Board with a full statement of the facts and all supporting data bearing upon the disputes." 48 Stat. 1191, 45 U. S. C. § 153 First (i).

[4] For this reason the decision in Slocum v. Delaware, L. & W. R. Co., 339 U. S. 239, is not applicable here. The courts below also relied on Hayes v. Union Pacific R. Co., 184 F. 2d 337, cert. denied, 340 U. S. 942, but for the reasons set forth in the text we believe that case was decided incorrectly.

[5] See, e. g., Leimer v. State Mutual Life Assur. Co., 108 F. 2d 302; Dioguardi v. Durning, 139 F. 2d 774; Continental Collieries v. Shober, 130 F. 2d 631.

[6] Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co., 323 U. S. 192, 203.

[7] See Dillard v. Chesapeake & Ohio R. Co., 199 F. 2d 948; Hughes Tool Co. v. Labor Board, 147 F. 2d 69, 74.

[8] Rule 8 (a) (2).

[9] See, e. g., Rule 12 (e) (motion for a more definite statement); Rule 12 (f) (motion to strike portions of the pleading); Rule 12 (c) (motion for judgment on the pleadings); Rule 16 (pre-trial procedure and formulation of issues); Rules 26-37 (depositions and discovery); Rule 56 (motion for summary judgment); Rule 15 (right to amend).

[1960] Stephen M. Shapiro, Kenneth S. Geller, Richard J. Favretto, Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP, Washington, D.C., Laura J. Coleman, J. Henry Walker, Marc W.F. Galonsky, Ashley Watson, Atlanta, Georgia, for BellSouth Corporation.

Timothy Beyer, Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, P.C., Denver, Colorado, Cynthia [1961] P. Delaney, Denver, Colorado, Counsel for Qwest Communications International Inc.

Michael K. Kellogg, Mark C. Hansen, Aaron M. Panner, Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, P.L.L.C., Washington, D.C., Javier Aguilar, William M. Schur, San Antonio, Texas, for AT&T; Inc. (formerly SBC Communications Inc.).

Richard G. Taranto, Farr & Taranto, Washington, D.C., Paul J. Larkin, Jr., David E. Wheeler, Robert J. Zastrow, Arlington, Virginia, Dan K. Webb, Charles B. Molster III, Winston & Strawn LLP, Chicago, Illinois, for Verizon Communications Inc. (successor-in-interest to Bell Atlantic Corporation).

Marc A. Topaz, Joseph H. Meltzer, Schiffrin & Barroway, LLP, Radnor, PA, J. Douglas Richards, Michael M. Buchman, Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman LLP, New York, NY, for Respondents.

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 survive a motion to dismiss when it alleges that major telecommunications 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 Telecommunications Act of 1996 (1996 Act), 110 Stat. 56, which "fundamentally restructure[d] local telephone markets" and "subject[ed] [ILECs] to a host of duties intended to facilitate market entry." AT & T Corp. v. Iowa Utilities Bd., 525 U.S. 366, 371, 119 S.Ct. 721, 142 L.Ed.2d 835 (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] obligation . . . to share its network with competitors," Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, 540 U.S. 398, 402, 124 S.Ct. 872, 157 L.Ed.2d 823 (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 network in any of three ways: by (1) "purchas[ing] local telephone 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 facilities with the [ILEC's] network." Iowa Utilities Bd., supra, at 371, 119 S.Ct. 721 (quoting 47 U.S.C. § 251(c)). Owing to the "considerable expense and effort" required to make unbundled network elements available to rivals at wholesale prices, Trinko, supra, at 410, 124 S.Ct. 872, the ILECs vigorously litigated the scope of the sharing obligation imposed by the 1996 Act, with the result that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) three times revised its [1962] regulations to narrow the range of network elements to be shared with the CLECs. See Covad Communications Co. v. FCC, 450 F.3d 528, 533-534 (C.A.D.C. 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 consisting 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 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 otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations."

The complaint alleges that the ILECs conspired to restrain 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 complaint, 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 competitive entry by CLECs would have been successful in the other territories in the absence of such conduct." Id., ¶ 50, App. 26-27.

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 "meaningfully [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 between the [ILECs] in one another's markets, and in light of the parallel course of conduct that each engaged 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 [1963] and belief that [the ILECs] have 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 another." Id., ¶ 51, App. 27.^[2]

The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. The District Court acknowledged that "plaintiffs may allege a conspiracy by citing instances of parallel business behavior that suggest an agreement," but emphasized that "while `[c]ircumstantial evidence of consciously parallel behavior may have made heavy inroads into the traditional 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, 74 S.Ct. 257, 98 L.Ed. 273 (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 additional facts that "ten[d] to exclude independent self-interested conduct as an explanation for defendants' parallel 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' supposed 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 to be pleaded to permit an antitrust claim based on parallel 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 parallelism 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. ___, 126 S.Ct. 2965, 165 L.Ed.2d 949 (2006), and now reverse.

[1964] 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," Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752, 775, 104 S.Ct. 2731, 81 L.Ed.2d 628 (1984), "[t]he crucial question" is whether the challenged anticompetitive conduct "stem[s] from independent decision or from an agreement, tacit or express," Theatre Enterprises, 346 U.S., at 540, 74 S.Ct. 257. 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 constituting] a Sherman Act offense." Id., at 540-541, 74 S.Ct. 257. 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, 113 S.Ct. 2578, 125 L.Ed.2d 168 (1993); see 6 P. Areeda & H. Hovenkamp, Antitrust Law ¶ 1433a, p. 236 (2d ed.2003) (hereinafter Areeda & Hovenkamp) ("The courts are nearly unanimous in saying that mere interdependent parallelism does not establish the contract, combination, or conspiracy required by Sherman Act § 1"); Turner, The Definition 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 decisions is not conspiracy").

The inadequacy of showing parallel conduct or interdependence, 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 business strategy unilaterally prompted by common perceptions of the market. See, e.g., AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Epstein, Motions to Dismiss Antitrust Cases: Separating Fact from Fantasy, Related Publication 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 Service Corp., 465 U.S. 752, 104 S.Ct. 1464, 79 L.Ed.2d 775 (1984); and at the summary judgment stage a § 1 plaintiffs offer of conspiracy evidence must tend to rule out the possibility that the defendants were acting independently, see Matsushita Elec. Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (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) 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, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (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 (C.A.7 1994), a plaintiffs obligation to provide the [1965] "grounds" of his "entitle[ment] to relief" requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do, see Papasan v. Allain, 478 U.S. 265, 286, 106 S.Ct. 2932, 92 L.Ed.2d 209 (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 doubtful in fact), see, e.g., Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N. A., 534 U.S. 506, 508, n. 1, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002); Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U.S. 319, 327, 109 S.Ct. 1827, 104 L.Ed.2d 338 (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, 94 S.Ct. 1683, 40 L.Ed.2d 90 (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 requirement 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 those facts 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 [1966] of the prior rulings and considered views of leading commentators, already quoted, that lawful parallel conduct fails to be-speak unlawful agreement. It makes sense to say, therefore, 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 conclusory 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 suggesting 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 commercial 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 enhancement it stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of "entitle[ment] to relief." Cf. DM Research, Inc. v. College of Am. Pathologists, 170 F.3d 53, 56 (C.A.1 1999) ("[T]erms like `conspiracy,' or even `agreement,' are border-line: they might well be sufficient in conjunction with a more specific allegation —for example, identifying 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]

We alluded to the practical significance of the Rule 8 entitlement requirement in Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, 544 U.S. 336, 125 S.Ct. 1627, 161 L.Ed.2d 577 (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, 125 S.Ct. 1627 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723, 741, 95 S.Ct. 1917, 44 L.Ed.2d 539 (1975)). So, when the allegations in a complaint, 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 (D.Hawai 1953)); see also Dura, supra, at 346, 125 S.Ct. 1627; Asahi Glass Co. v. Pentech Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 289 F.Supp.2d 986, 995 (N.D.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. [1967] 464, 473, 82 S.Ct. 486, 7 L.Ed.2d 458 (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, 103 S.Ct. 897, 74 L.Ed.2d 723 (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 (C.A.7 1984) ("[T]he costs of modern federal antitrust litigation and the increasing caseload of the federal courts counsel against sending the parties into discovery when there is no reasonable 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 Litigation, 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 discovery is actively employed). That potential expense is obvious 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 continental United States, in an action against America's largest 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 management," post at 1975, given the common lament that the success of judicial supervision in checking discovery abuse has been on the modest side. See, e.g., Easterbrook, Discovery 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 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 1975; the threat of discovery expense will push cost-conscious defendants 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 conspiracy that we can hope to avoid the potentially enormous expense of discovery in cases with no "`reasonably founded hope that the [discovery] process will reveal relevant evidence'" to support a § 1 claim. Dura, 544 U.S., at 347, 125 S.Ct. 1627 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps, supra, at 741, 95 S.Ct. 1917; alteration in Dura).^[6]

[1968] Plaintiffs do not, of course, dispute the requirement of plausibility and the need for something more than merely parallel behavior explained in Theatre Enterprises, Monsanto, and Matsushita, and their main argument against the plausibility standard at the pleading stage is its ostensible 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, 78 S.Ct. 99. 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 pleading standard, see 425 F.3d, at 106, 114 (invoking Conley's "no set of facts" language in describing the standard for dismissal).^[7]

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 [1969] 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 approach 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, 125 S.Ct. 1627 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps, 421 U.S., at 741, 95 S.Ct. 1917); 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 (C.A.9 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 (C.A.1 1976) ("[W]hen a plaintiff. . . supplies facts to support his claim, we do not think that Conley imposes a duty on the courts to conjure up unpleaded facts that might turn a frivolous claim of unconstitutional. . . action into a substantial one"); McGregor v. Industrial Excess Landfill, Inc., 856 F.2d 39, 42-43 (C.A.6 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 between 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 adequately, 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, 122 S.Ct. 992; National Organization for Women, Inc. v. Scheidler, 510 U.S. 249, 256, 114 S.Ct. 798, 127 L.Ed.2d 99 (1994); H.J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co., 492 U.S. 229, 249-250, 109 S.Ct. 2893, 106 L.Ed.2d 195 (1989); Hishon v. King & Spalding, 467 U.S. 69, 73, 104 S.Ct. 2229, 81 L.Ed.2d 59 (1984). Conley, then, described the breadth of opportunity to prove what an adequate complaint claims, not the minimum standard of adequate pleading to govern a complaint's survival.^[8]

[1970] 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 1962-1963. 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 competition 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 compete with one another." Complaint ¶ 51, App. 27.^[10] The nub of the [1971] complaint, then, is the ILECs' parallel behavior, consisting of steps to keep the CLECs out and manifest disinterest in becoming CLECs themselves, and its sufficiency 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 invests 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, unilateral 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 resisting 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 alleging parallel decisions to resist competition were enough to imply an antitrust conspiracy, pleading a § 1 violation against almost any group of competing businesses 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 reason to want to avoid dealing with CLECs" and "each ILEC would attempt to keep CLECs out, regardless of the actions of the other ILECs." 313 F.Supp.2d, at 184; cf. Kramer v. Pollock-Krasner Foundation, 890 F.Supp. 250, 256 (S.D.N.Y.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]

[1972] Plaintiffs' second conspiracy theory rests on the competitive 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 companies . . . might attack their neighbors' service areas, as 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 compartmentalized geographically, with minimal competition. Based on this state of affairs, and perceiving the ILECs to be blessed with "especially attractive business opportunities" 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, 122 S.Ct. 1646, 152 L.Ed.2d 701 (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 monopolists 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 opportunit[ies]" by declining to compete as CLECs against other 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 [1973] the complaint is replete with indications that any CLEC faced nearly insurmountable 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 conspiracy 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, 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, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002), which held that "a complaint in an employment discrimination lawsuit [need] not contain specific facts establishing a prima facie case of discrimination under the framework set forth in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792[, 93 S.Ct. 1817, 36 L.Ed.2d 668] (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 discrimination cases," Swierkiewicz, supra, at 512, 122 S.Ct. 992, "transpos[ing] `plus factor' summary judgment analysis woodenly into a rigid Rule 12(b)(6) pleading standard . . . would be unwise," 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 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, 122 S.Ct. 992. We reversed on the ground that the Court of Appeals had impermissibly applied what amounted to a heightened pleading requirement by insisting that Swierkiewicz allege "specific facts" beyond [1974] those necessary to state his claim and the grounds showing entitlement to relief. Id., at 508, 122 S.Ct. 992.

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.

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 allegations 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 1961. 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, 74 S.Ct. 257, 98 L.Ed. 273 (1954), would adequately resolve this case. As Theatre Enterprises held, parallel conduct is circumstantial evidence admissible on the issue of conspiracy, but it is not itself illegal. Id., at 540-542, 74 S.Ct. 257.

Thus, this is a case in which there is no dispute about the substantive law. If the defendants acted independently, 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 proceed? Does a judicial opinion that the charge is not "plausible" provide a legally acceptable reason for dismissing 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 another." Amended Complaint in No. 02 CIV. 10220(GEL) (SDNY) ¶ 51, App. 27 (hereinafter Complaint).

The complaint explains that, contrary to Congress' expectation 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 competitors 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, respondents 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 Report [1975] 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 complaint, "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, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002); see Overstreet v. North Shore Corp., 318 U.S. 125, 127, 63 S.Ct. 494, 87 L.Ed. 656 (1943). But instead of requiring knowledgeable executives such as Notebaert to respond to these allegations by way of sworn depositions 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 permits 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 1971; that "there was just no need for joint encouragement to resist the 1996 Act," ante, at 1971; 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 1972.

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 presence 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 statements," ante, at 1970; 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 response 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 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 Procedure 12(b)(6) that seems to be driven by the majority's appraisal of the plausibility of the ultimate factual allegation rather than its legal sufficiency.

I

Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules requires that a complaint 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 1834^[15]—made obvious [1976] the appeal of a pleading 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 understanding 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. Equity Rule 25 (requiring "a short and simple statement of 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 ultimate 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 statements 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 intentionally avoided any reference to "facts" or "evidence" or "conclusions." See 5 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice 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 `evidentiary 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 appropriate, through the crucible of trial. See Swierkiewicz, 534 U.S., at 514, 122 S.Ct. 992 ("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,^[16] 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 [1977] 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 complaint states only: "On June 1, 1936, in a public highway called Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts, defendant 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 judgment. The asserted ground for relief— namely, the defendant's negligent driving—would have been called a "`conclusion of law'" under the code pleading of old. See, e.g., Cook 419. But that bare allegation suffices under a system that "restrict[s] the pleadings to the task of general notice-giving and invest[s] the deposition-discovery process with a vital role in the preparation for trial."<sup>[17]</sup> Hickman v. Taylor, 329 U.S. 495, 501, 67 S.Ct. 385, 91 L.Ed. 451 (1947); see also Swierkiewicz, 534 U.S., at 513, n. 4, 122 S.Ct. 992 (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 (C.A.7 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, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (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 sufficient specificity. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Black rejected the union's claim as foreclosed by the language of Rule 8. Id., at 47-48, 78 S.Ct. 99. 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, 78 S.Ct. 99.

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 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 "questioned, criticized, and explained away long enough," ante, at 1969, the Court dismisses it as careless composition.

[1978] 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.^[18] 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 Columbia utilize as their standard for dismissal of a complaint the very language the majority repudiates: whether it appears "beyond doubt" that "no set of facts" in support of the claim would entitle the plaintiff to relief.^[19]

[1979] Petitioners have not requested that the Conley formulation 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 informed 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'" language "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." Ante, at 1969. 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.^[20] The "pleading standard" label the majority gives to what it reads into the Conley opinion—a statement of the permissible factual support for an adequately pleaded complaint—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 [1980] U.S., at 45, 78 S.Ct. 99 (emphasis added). It was, to paraphrase today's majority, describing "the minimum standard of adequate pleading to govern a complaint's survival," ante, at 1969.

We can be triply sure as to Conley's meaning by examining 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, 78 S.Ct. 99. In the first case, Leimer v. State Mut. Life Assur. Co. of Worcester, Mass., 108 F.2d 302 (C.A.8 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 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. Rockwood, 69 F.2d 326, 329 (C.A.8 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 determine 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 dismissed 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 635.

The third case the Conley Court cited approvingly was written by Judge Clark himself. In Dioguardi v. Durning, 139 F.2d 774 (C.A.2 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 [1981] 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 opinion disquieted the defense bar and gave rise to a movement 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 would entitle the plaintiff to relief is hardly "puzzling," ante, at 1969. 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 understanding of the Federal Rules in the half century since Conley. For example, in Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U.S. 232, 94 S.Ct. 1683, 40 L.Ed.2d 90 (1974), we reversed the Court of Appeals' dismissal on the pleadings when the respondents, the Governor and other officials 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 entitled 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, 94 S.Ct. 1683 (emphasis added).

The Rhodes plaintiffs had "alleged generally and in conclusory terms" that the defendants, by calling out the National Guard to suppress the Kent State University student protests, "were guilty of wanton, wilful and negligent conduct." Krause v. Rhodes, 471 F.2d 430, 433 (C.A.6 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 styled as suits against the defendants in their individual capacities. 416 U.S., at 238, 94 S.Ct. 1683.

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, 113 S.Ct. 1160, 122 L.Ed.2d 517 (1993). Writing for the unanimous Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist rebuffed the Fifth Circuit's effort to craft a standard for pleading municipal 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 [1982] particularity the basis for the claim which necessarily includes why the defendant-official cannot successfully maintain the defense of immunity." Leatherman, 507 U.S., at 167, 113 S.Ct. 1160 (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, 113 S.Ct. 1160.

Most recently, in Swierkiewicz, 534 U.S. 506, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1, we were faced with a case more similar to the present one than the majority will allow. In discrimination cases, our precedents 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, 93 S.Ct. 1817, 36 L.Ed.2d 668 (1973). See, e.g., Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Thurston, 469 U.S. 111, 121, 105 S.Ct. 613, 83 L.Ed.2d 523 (1985). Swierkiewicz alleged that he had been terminated on account of national origin in violation of Title VII of the 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, 122 S.Ct. 992. 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, 122 S.Ct. 992; 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)).^[21]

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 circumstantial evidence of conspiracy. See Matsushita Elec. Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986). 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 parallel conduct of the defendants. In order to survive a Rule 56 motion, a § 1 plaintiff "must present evidence `that tends to exclude [1983] the possibility' that the alleged conspirators acted independently.'" Id., at 588, 106 S.Ct. 1348 (quoting Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp., 465 U.S. 752, 764, 104 S.Ct. 1464, 79 L.Ed.2d 775 (1984)). That is, the plaintiff "must show that the inference of conspiracy is reasonable in light of the competing inferences of independent action or collusive action." 475 U.S., at 588, 106 S.Ct. 1348.

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 heightened 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 behavior—the claimed conspiracy is "conceivable" but not "plausible," ante, at 1974. 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 conspirators,' . . . dismissals prior to giving the plaintiff ample opportunity for discovery should be granted very sparingly." Hospital Building Co. v. Trustees of Rex Hospital, 425 U.S. 738, 746, 96 S.Ct. 1848, 48 L.Ed.2d 338 (1976) (quoting Poller v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 368 U.S. 464, 473, 82 S.Ct. 486, 7 L.Ed.2d 458 (1962)); see also Knuth v. Erie-Crawford Dairy Cooperative Assn., 395 F.2d 420, 423 (C.A.3 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, 77 S.Ct. 390, 1 L.Ed.2d 456 (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 special 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. Reasoner eds.1965) (hereinafter [1984] Clark, Special Pleading in the Big Case) (emphasis added).

In this "Big Case," the Court succumbs to the temptation that previous Courts have steadfastly resisted.^[22] While the majority assures us that it is not applying any "`heightened'" pleading standard, see ante, at 1973, 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, 103 S.Ct. 897, 74 L.Ed.2d 723 (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, 97 S.Ct. 690, 50 L.Ed.2d 701 (1977). Rather, the theory on 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, 124 S.Ct. 872, 157 L.Ed.2d 823 (2004); it also permitted the existing firms to compete with each other and to expand their operations into previously 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 [1985] 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 1965.

The majority circumvents this obvious obstacle to dismissal by pretending that it does not exist. The Court admits that "in form a few stray statements in the complaint 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 1970. The Court's dichotomy between factual allegations and "legal conclusions" is the stuff of a bygone era, supra, at 1976-1977. That distinction was a 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. Employing Plasterers Assn. of Chicago, 347 U.S. 186, 188, 74 S.Ct. 452, 98 L.Ed. 618 (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 (C.A.7 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' cliche means, does not automatically condemn it"); Walker Distributing Co. v. Lucky Lager Brewing Co., 323 F.2d 1, 3-4 (C.A.9 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, Chemical & Atomic Workers Int'l Union v. Delta, 277 F.2d 694, 697 (C.A.6 1960) ("Under the notice system of pleading established by the Rules of Civil Procedure,. . . the ancient 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 1977. Indeed it is less of one.^[23]

Even if I were inclined to accept the Court's anachronistic dichotomy and ignore the complaint's actual allegations, 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 [1986] points not only to petitioners' numerous opportunities to meet with each other, Complaint ¶ 46, App. 23,^[24] but also to Notebaert's curious statement that encroaching on a fellow incumbent's territory "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 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 Competitive Telecom construed Notebaert's statement, id., ¶ 44, App. 22 (calling the statement "evidence of potential collusion 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 Congress 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, however, 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 1972-1973, 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 posterity. But more importantly the District Court was required at this stage of the proceedings to construe Notebaert's ambiguous statement in the plaintiffs' favor.^[25] See Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 768, n. 1, 104 S.Ct. 3315, 82 L.Ed.2d 556 (1984). The inference 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 massive discovery based solely on the allegations in this complaint. On the other hand, I surely would not have dismissed the complaint [1987] 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."^[26] ¶ 51, App. 27. Even a sworn denial of that charge would not justify a summary dismissal without giving the plaintiffs the opportunity to take depositions from Notebaert and at least one responsible executive representing each of the other defendants.

Respondents in this case proposed a plan of "`phased discovery'" limited to the existence of the alleged conspiracy 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 appropriate subject for negotiation.^[27] Given the charge in the complaint—buttressed by the common sense of Adam Smith—I cannot say that the possibility that joint discussions [1988] and perhaps some agreements played a role in petitioners' 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 discovery and summary judgment we have developed new devices, 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 economic theory to conclusively resolve antitrust suits in the absence of any evidence. It is no surprise that the antitrust defense bar— among whom "lament" as to inadequate judicial supervision of discovery is most "common," see ante, at 1967—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.^[28] See Swierkiewicz, 534 U.S., at 515, 122 S.Ct. 992; Crawford-El v. Britton, 523 U.S. 574, 595, 118 S.Ct. 1584, 140 L.Ed.2d 759 (1998); Leatherman, 507 U.S., at 168, 113 S.Ct. 1160.

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. ___, ___, 127 S.Ct. 1534, 167 L.Ed.2d 449 (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 congressional intent should guide us in matters of statutory interpretation. Id., at ___, 127 S.Ct. 1534 (STEVENS, J., concurring). This is a case in which the intentions of the drafters of three important sources of law—the Sherman Act, the Telecommunications 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 [1989] 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 1966-1967. 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 respondents as well as petitioners,^[29] that concern would not provide an adequate justification for this law-changing decision. For in the final analysis it is only a lack of confidence 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, today'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.

[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 Communications International, Inc., SBC Communications, Inc., and Verizon Communications, Inc. (successor-in-interest to Bell Atlantic Corporation). 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.

[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, App. 30-31.

[3] The dissent greatly oversimplifies matters by suggesting that the Federal Rules somehow dispensed with the pleading of facts altogether. See post, at 1979 (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, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (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 requirement 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 circumstances, 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").

[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 freedom of action and sense of obligation that one generally associates with agreement"). The parties in this case agree that "complex and historically 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.

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

[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 determining 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 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.2d 319 (C.A.2 1957), that facts indicating parallel conduct alone suffice to state a claim under § 1. 425 F.3d, at 114 (citing Nagler, supra, at 325). But Nagler gave no explanation for citing Theatre Enterprises (which upheld a denial of a directed 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, 104 S.Ct. 1464, 79 L.Ed.2d 775 (1984), and Matsushita Elec. Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986), have made it 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.

[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 1978. Although we have not previously explained the circumstances 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, 125 S.Ct. 1627 (quoting Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723, 741, 95 S.Ct. 1917, 44 L.Ed.2d 539 (1975)); (requiring "`reasonably founded hope that the [discovery] process will reveal relevant evidence'" to support the claim (alteration in Dura)); Associated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U.S. 519, 526, 103 S.Ct. 897, 74 L.Ed.2d 723 (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. Schnettler, 365 U.S. 381, 383, 81 S.Ct. 632, 5 L.Ed.2d 620 (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 offense"). Nor are we reaching out to decide this issue in a case where the matter was not raised by the parties, see post, at 1979, 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 1979-1981. 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 (C.A.8 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 (C.A.3 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 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, 94 S.Ct. 1683, 40 L.Ed.2d 90 (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 engaged 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, which the dissent says exemplifies the kind of "bare allegation" that survives a motion to dismiss. Post, at 1977. 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 (S.D.N.Y.2003); 425 F.3d 99, 102-104 (C.A. 2005).

[12] From the allegation that the ILECs belong to various trade associations, 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 1985-1986, 1987-1988. 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 depositions, 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.

[13] The complaint quoted a reported statement of Qwest's CEO, Richard 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, Business Section, p. 1 (cited at Complaint ¶ 42, App. 22). Another source cited in the complaint quotes Notebaert as saying he thought it "unwise" to "base a business plan" on the privileges accorded to CLECs under the 1996 Act because the regulatory environment was too unstable. Chicago Tribune, Dec. 19, 2002, Business Section, p. 2 (cited at Complaint ¶ 45, App. 23).

[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, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002) (quoting Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 507 U.S. 163, 168, 113 S.Ct. 1160, 122 L.Ed.2d 517 (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.

[15] See 9 W. Holdsworth, History of English Law 324-327 (1926).

[16] Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U.S. 271, 283, 108 S.Ct. 1133, 99 L.Ed.2d 296 (1988).

[17] 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 Leatherman v. Tarrant Cty. Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 507 U.S. 163, 168, 113 S.Ct. 1160, 122 L.Ed.2d 517 (1993).

[18] SEC v. Zandford, 535 U.S. 813, 818, 122 S.Ct. 1899, 153 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002); Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Ed., 526 U.S. 629, 654, 119 S.Ct. 1661, 143 L.Ed.2d 839 (1999); Hartford Fire Ins. Co. v. California, 509 U.S. 764, 811, 113 S.Ct. 2891, 125 L.Ed.2d 612 (1993); Brower v. County of Inyo, 489 U.S. 593, 598, 109 S.Ct. 1378, 103 L.Ed.2d 628 (1989); Hughes v. Rowe, 449 U.S. 5, 10, 101 S.Ct. 173, 66 L.Ed.2d 163 (1980) (per curiam); McLain v. Real Estate Bd. of New Orleans, Inc., 444 U.S. 232, 246, 100 S.Ct. 502, 62 L.Ed.2d 441 (1980); Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 106, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976); Hospital Building Co. v. Trustees of Rex Hospital, 425 U.S. 738, 746, 96 S.Ct. 1848, 48 L.Ed.2d 338 (1976); Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U.S. 232, 236, 94 S.Ct. 1683, 40 L.Ed.2d 90 (1974); Cruz v. Beto, 405 U.S. 319, 322, 92 S.Ct. 1079, 31 L.Ed.2d 263 (1972) (per curiam); Haines v. Kerner, 404 U.S. 519, 521, 92 S.Ct. 594, 30 L.Ed.2d 652 (1972) (per curiam); Jenkins v. McKeithen, 395 U.S. 411, 422, 89 S.Ct. 1843, 23 L.Ed.2d 404 (1969) (plurality opinion); see also Cleveland Bd. of Ed. v. Loudermill, 470 U.S. 532, 554, 105 S.Ct. 1487, 84 L.Ed.2d 494 (1985) (Brennan, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part); Hoover v. Ronwin, 466 U.S. 558, 587, 104 S.Ct. 1989, 80 L.Ed.2d 590 (1984) (STEVENS, J., dissenting); United Air Lines, Inc. v. Evans, 431 U.S. 553, 561, n. 1, 97 S.Ct. 1885, 52 L.Ed.2d 571 (1977) (Marshall, J., dissenting); Simon v. Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization, 426 U.S. 26, 55, n. 6, 96 S.Ct. 1917, 48 L.Ed.2d 450 (1976) (Brennan, J., concurring in judgment).

[19] 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 Hawai`i 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, 1254 (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 complaint" (internal quotation marks omitted)); Canel v. Topinka, 212 Ill.2d 311, 318, 288 Ill.Dec. 623, 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 "appears beyond doubt" with "appears to a certainty"); Barkema v. Williams Pipeline Co., 666 N.W.2d 612, 614 (Iowa 2003) (holding that a motion to dismiss should be sustained "only when there exists no 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 WL 23540085 (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").

[20] The majority is correct to say that what the Federal Rules require is a "`showing'" of entitlement to relief. Ante, at 1965, 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 in this case alleged only parallel conduct, it would not have made the required "showing." See supra, at 1974. 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 defendants 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 pleading stage.

[21] 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)).

[22] Our decision in Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, 544 U.S. 336, 125 S.Ct. 1627, 161 L.Ed.2d 577 (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, 125 S.Ct. 1627. 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, 103 S.Ct. 897, 74 L.Ed.2d 723 (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, 103 S.Ct. 897; see id., at 526, 103 S.Ct. 897 ("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").

[23] 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 1970-1971, 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, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002). Petitioners made no such motion and indeed have conceded that "[o]ur problem with the current complaint is 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 persons involved in the alleged conspiracies," ante, at 1971, n. 10, is, for our purposes, academic.

[24] The Court describes my reference to the allegation that the defendants belong to various trade associations as "playfully" suggesting that the defendants conspired to restrain trade. Ante, at 1971-1972, 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 descriptions of parallel conduct and not on any independent allegation of actual agreement among the ILECs," ante, at 1970, there would have been no purpose in including a reference to the trade association meetings in the amended complaint.

[25] It is ironic that the Court seeks to justify its decision to draw factual inferences in the defendants' favor at the pleading stage by citing to a rule of evidence, ante, at 1972-1973, 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 a conspiracy is hardly beyond reasonable dispute.

[26] The Court worries that a defendant seeking to respond to this "conclusory" allegation "would have little idea where to begin." Ante, at 1971, n. 10. A defendant could, of course, begin by either denying or admitting the charge.

[27] The potential for "sprawling, costly, and hugely time-consuming" discovery, ante, at 1967, 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, 118 S.Ct. 1584, 140 L.Ed.2d 759 (1998); and Rule 23 requires "rigorous analysis" to ensure that class certification is appropriate, General Telephone Co. of Southwest v. Falcon, 457 U.S. 147, 160, 102 S.Ct. 2364, 72 L.Ed.2d 740 (1982); see In re Initial Public Offering Securities Litigation, 471 F.3d 24 (C.A.2 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 conferences 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 combination 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, 118 S.Ct. 1584. Indeed, Rule 26(c) specifically permits a court to take actions "to protect a party or person from annoyance, 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 allegations 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, 78 S.Ct. 1087, 2 L.Ed.2d 1255 (1958) ("Rule 34 is sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the exigencies of particular litigation"). 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 presented "for any improper purpose, such as to harass or to cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation"); see Business Guides, Inc. v. Chromatic Communications Enterprises, Inc., 498 U.S. 533, 111 S.Ct. 922, 112 L.Ed.2d 1140 (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 (D.D.C.2005) ("As possible sanctions pursuant to Rule 11, the court has an arsenal of options at its disposal").

[28] Given his "background in antitrust law," ante,at 1968, 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 abandoning 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 otherwise." Discovery as Abuse, 69 B.U.L.Rev. 635, 645 (1989).

[29] It would 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").

[1942] Gregory G. Garre, Solicitor General, Washington, DC, for Petitioners.

Alexander A. Reinert, for Respondents.

Lauren J. Resnick, Fernando A. Bohorquez, Jr., Baker & Hostetler LLP, New York, NY, Thomas D. Warren Karl Fanter, Baker & Hostetler LLP, Cleveland, OH, for Michael Rolince.

Leslie R. Caldwell, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, New York, NY, Brett M. Schuman, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, San Francisco, CA, for Kenneth Maxwell.

Michael L. Martinez, David E. Bell, Matthew F. Scarlato, Crowell & Moring LLP, Washington, DC, for Respondent Dennis Hasty.

David J. Ball, Rima J. Oken, Jennifer Brace, Etai Lahav, Well, Gotshal & Manges LLP, New York, New York, Alexander A. Reinert, Joan M. Magoolaghan, Elizabeth L. Koob, Koob & Magoolaghan, Yonkers, New York, for Respondent Javaid Iqbal.

Gregory G. Garre, Acting Solicitor General, Gregory G. Katsas, Assistant Attorney General, Jonathan F. Cohn, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Curtis E. Gannon, Assistant to the Solicitor General, Barbara L. Herwig, Robert M. Loeb, Sarang Vijay Damle, Washington, D.C., for Petitioners.

Justice KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court.

Respondent Javaid Iqbal is a citizen of Pakistan and a Muslim. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks he was arrested in the United States on criminal charges and detained by federal officials. Respondent claims he was deprived of various constitutional protections while in federal custody. To redress the alleged deprivations, respondent filed a complaint against numerous federal officials, including John Ashcroft, the former Attorney General of the United States, and Robert Mueller, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Ashcroft and Mueller are the petitioners in the case now before us. As to these two petitioners, the complaint alleges that they adopted an unconstitutional policy that subjected respondent to harsh conditions of confinement on account of his race, religion, or national origin.

In the District Court petitioners raised the defense of qualified immunity and moved to dismiss the suit, contending the complaint was not sufficient to state a claim against them. The District Court denied the motion to dismiss, concluding the complaint was sufficient to state a claim despite petitioners' official status at the times in question. Petitioners brought an interlocutory appeal in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The court, without discussion, assumed it had jurisdiction over the order denying the motion to dismiss; and it affirmed the District Court's decision.

Respondent's account of his prison ordeal could, if proved, demonstrate unconstitutional misconduct by some governmental actors. But the allegations and pleadings with respect to these actors are not before us here. This case instead turns on a narrower question: Did respondent, as the plaintiff in the District Court, [1943] plead factual matter that, if taken as true, states a claim that petitioners deprived him of his clearly established constitutional rights. We hold respondent's pleadings are insufficient.

I

Following the 2001 attacks, the FBI and other entities within the Department of Justice began an investigation of vast reach to identify the assailants and prevent them from attacking anew. The FBI dedicated more than 4,000 special agents and 3,000 support personnel to the endeavor. By September 18 "the FBI had received more than 96,000 tips or potential leads from the public." Dept. of Justice, Office of Inspector General, The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks 1, 11-12 (Apr.2003) (hereinafter OIG Report), http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/ 0306/ full.pdf?bcsi_scan_61073EC0F74759AD=0 & bcsi_scan_filename=full.pdf (as visited May 14, 2009, and available in Clerk of Court's case file).

In the ensuing months the FBI questioned more than 1,000 people with suspected links to the attacks in particular or to terrorism in general. Id., at 1. Of those individuals, some 762 were held on immigration charges; and a 184-member subset of that group was deemed to be "of `high interest'" to the investigation. Id., at 111. The high-interest detainees were held under restrictive conditions designed to prevent them from communicating with the general prison population or the outside world. Id., at 112-113.

Respondent was one of the detainees. According to his complaint, in November 2001 agents of the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested him on charges of fraud in relation to identification documents and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F.3d 143, 147-148 (C.A.2 2007). Pending trial for those crimes, respondent was housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York. Respondent was designated a person "of high interest" to the September 11 investigation and in January 2002 was placed in a section of the MDC known as the Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit (ADMAX SHU). Id., at 148. As the facility's name indicates, the ADMAX SHU incorporates the maximum security conditions allowable under Federal Bureau of Prison regulations. Ibid. ADMAX SHU detainees were kept in lockdown 23 hours a day, spending the remaining hour outside their cells in handcuffs and leg irons accompanied by a four-officer escort. Ibid.

Respondent pleaded guilty to the criminal charges, served a term of imprisonment, and was removed to his native Pakistan. Id., at 149. He then filed a Bivens action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York against 34 current and former federal officials and 19 "John Doe" federal corrections officers. See Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 29 L.Ed.2d 619 (1971). The defendants range from the correctional officers who had day-to-day contact with respondent during the term of his confinement, to the wardens of the MDC facility, all the way to petitioners—officials who were at the highest level of the federal law enforcement hierarchy. First Amended Complaint in No. 04-CV-1809 (JG)(JA), ¶¶ 10-11, App. to Pet. for Cert. 157a (hereinafter Complaint).

The 21-cause-of-action complaint does not challenge respondent's arrest or his confinement in the MDC's general prison population. Rather, it concentrates on his [1944] treatment while confined to the ADMAX SHU. The complaint sets forth various claims against defendants who are not before us. For instance, the complaint alleges that respondent's jailors "kicked him in the stomach, punched him in the face, and dragged him across" his cell without justification, id., ¶ 113, App. to Pet. for Cert. 176a; subjected him to serial strip and body-cavity searches when he posed no safety risk to himself or others, id., ¶¶ 143-145, App. to Pet. for Cert. 182a; and refused to let him and other Muslims pray because there would be "[n]o prayers for terrorists," id., ¶ 154, App. to Pet. for Cert. 184a.

The allegations against petitioners are the only ones relevant here. The complaint contends that petitioners designated respondent a person of high interest on account of his race, religion, or national origin, in contravention of the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. The complaint alleges that "the [FBI], under the direction of Defendant MUELLER, arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men . . . as part of its investigation of the events of September 11." Id., ¶ 47, at 164a. It further alleges that "[t]he policy of holding post-September-11th detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were `cleared' by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001." Id., ¶ 69, at 168a. Lastly, the complaint posits that petitioners "each knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject" respondent to harsh conditions of confinement "as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest." Id., ¶ 96, at 172a-173a. The pleading names Ashcroft as the "principal architect" of the policy, id., ¶ 10, at 157a, and identifies Mueller as "instrumental in [its] adoption, promulgation, and implementation." Id., ¶ 11, at 157a.

Petitioners moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state sufficient allegations to show their own involvement in clearly established unconstitutional conduct. The District Court denied their motion. Accepting all of the allegations in respondent's complaint as true, the court held that "it cannot be said that there [is] no set of facts on which [respondent] would be entitled to relief as against" petitioners. Id., at 136a-137a (relying on Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957)). Invoking the collateral-order doctrine petitioners filed an interlocutory appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. While that appeal was pending, this Court decided Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007), which discussed the standard for evaluating whether a complaint is sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.

The Court of Appeals considered Twombly's applicability to this case. Acknowledging that Twombly retired the Conley no-set-of-facts test relied upon by the District Court, the Court of Appeals' opinion discussed at length how to apply this Court's "standard for assessing the adequacy of pleadings." 490 F.3d, at 155. It concluded that Twombly called for a "flexible `plausibility standard,' which obliges a pleader to amplify a claim with some factual allegations in those contexts where such amplification is needed to render the claim plausible." Id., at 157-158. The court found that petitioners' appeal did not present one of "those contexts" requiring amplification. As a consequence, it held respondent's pleading adequate to allege petitioners' personal involvement in discriminatory decisions which, if true, violated clearly established constitutional law. Id., at 174.

[1945] Judge Cabranes concurred. He agreed that the majority's "discussion of the relevant pleading standards reflect[ed] the uneasy compromise . . . between a qualified immunity privilege rooted in the need to preserve the effectiveness of government as contemplated by our constitutional structure and the pleading requirements of Rule 8(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure." Id., at 178 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Judge Cabranes nonetheless expressed concern at the prospect of subjecting high-ranking Government officials—entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity and charged with responding to "a national and international security emergency unprecedented in the history of the American Republic"—to the burdens of discovery on the basis of a complaint as nonspecific as respondent's. Id., at 179. Reluctant to vindicate that concern as a member of the Court of Appeals, ibid., Judge Cabranes urged this Court to address the appropriate pleading standard "at the earliest opportunity." Id., at 178. We granted certiorari, 554 U.S. ___, 128 S.Ct. 2931, 171 L.Ed.2d 863 (2008), and now reverse.

II

We first address whether the Court of Appeals had subject-matter jurisdiction to affirm the District Court's order denying petitioners' motion to dismiss. Respondent disputed subject-matter jurisdiction in the Court of Appeals, but the court hardly discussed the issue. We are not free to pretermit the question. Subjectmatter jurisdiction cannot be forfeited or waived and should be considered when fairly in doubt. Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp., 546 U.S. 500, 514, 126 S.Ct. 1235, 163 L.Ed.2d 1097 (2006) (citing United States v. Cotton, 535 U.S. 625, 630, 122 S.Ct. 1781, 152 L.Ed.2d 860 (2002)). According to respondent, the District Court's order denying petitioners' motion to dismiss is not appealable under the collateral-order doctrine. We disagree.

A

With exceptions inapplicable here, Congress has vested the courts of appeals with "jurisdiction of appeals from all final decisions of the district courts of the United States." 28 U.S.C. § 1291. Though the statute's finality requirement ensures that "interlocutory appeals—appeals before the end of district court proceedings—are the exception, not the rule," Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 309, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238 (1995), it does not prevent "review of all prejudgment orders." Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U.S. 299, 305, 116 S.Ct. 834, 133 L.Ed.2d 773 (1996). Under the collateral-order doctrine a limited set of district-court orders are reviewable "though short of final judgment." Ibid. The orders within this narrow category "are immediately appealable because they `finally determine claims of right separable from, and collateral to, rights asserted in the action, too important to be denied review and too independent of the cause itself to require that appellate consideration be deferred until the whole case is adjudicated.'" Ibid. (quoting Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 546, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949)).

A district-court decision denying a Government officer's claim of qualified immunity can fall within the narrow class of appealable orders despite "the absence of a final judgment." Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985). This is so because qualified immunity—which shields Government officials "from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights," Harlow v. Fitzgerald, [1946] 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982)—is both a defense to liability and a limited "entitlement not to stand trial or face the other burdens of litigation." Mitchell, supra, 472 U.S., at 526, 105 S.Ct. 2806. Provided it "turns on an issue of law," id., at 530, 105 S.Ct. 2806, a district-court order denying qualified immunity "`conclusively determine[s]'" that the defendant must bear the burdens of discovery; is "conceptually distinct from the merits of the plaintiff's claim"; and would prove "effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment." Id., at 527-528 (citing Cohen, supra, at 546, 69 S.Ct. 1221). As a general matter, the collateral-order doctrine may have expanded beyond the limits dictated by its internal logic and the strict application of the criteria set out in Cohen. But the applicability of the doctrine in the context of qualified-immunity claims is well established; and this Court has been careful to say that a district court's order rejecting qualified immunity at the motion-to-dismiss stage of a proceeding is a "final decision" within the meaning of § 1291. Behrens, 516 U.S., at 307, 116 S.Ct. 834.

B

Applying these principles, we conclude that the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction to hear petitioners' appeal. The District Court's order denying petitioners' motion to dismiss turned on an issue of law and rejected the defense of qualified immunity. It was therefore a final decision "subject to immediate appeal." Ibid. Respondent says that "a qualified immunity appeal based solely on the complaint's failure to state a claim, and not on the ultimate issues relevant to the qualified immunity defense itself, is not a proper subject of interlocutory jurisdiction." Brief for Respondent Iqbal 15 (hereinafter Iqbal Brief). In other words, respondent contends the Court of Appeals had jurisdiction to determine whether his complaint avers a clearly established constitutional violation but that it lacked jurisdiction to pass on the sufficiency of his pleadings. Our opinions, however, make clear that appellate jurisdiction is not so strictly confined.

In Hartman v. Moore, 547 U.S. 250, 126 S.Ct. 1695, 164 L.Ed.2d 441 (2006), the Court reviewed an interlocutory decision denying qualified immunity. The legal issue decided in Hartman concerned the elements a plaintiff "must plead and prove in order to win" a First Amendment retaliation claim. Id., at 257, n. 5, 126 S.Ct. 1695. Similarly, two Terms ago in Wilkie v. Robbins, 551 U.S. 537, 127 S.Ct. 2588, 168 L.Ed.2d 389 (2007), the Court considered another interlocutory order denying qualified immunity. The legal issue there was whether a Bivens action can be employed to challenge interference with property rights. 551 U.S., at 549, n. 4, 127 S.Ct. 2588. These cases cannot be squared with respondent's argument that the collateralorder doctrine restricts appellate jurisdiction to the "ultimate issu[e]" whether the legal wrong asserted was a violation of clearly established law while excluding the question whether the facts pleaded establish such a violation. Iqbal Brief 15. Indeed, the latter question is even more clearly within the category of appealable decisions than the questions presented in Hartman and Wilkie, since whether a particular complaint sufficiently alleges a clearly established violation of law cannot be decided in isolation from the facts pleaded. In that sense the sufficiency of respondent's pleadings is both "inextricably intertwined with," Swint v. Chambers County Comm'n, 514 U.S. 35, 51, 115 S.Ct. 1203, 131 L.Ed.2d 60 (1995), and "directly implicated by," Hartman, supra, at 257, n. [1947] 5, 126 S.Ct. 1695, the qualified immunity defense.

Respondent counters that our holding in Johnson, 515 U.S. 304, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238, confirms the want of subjectmatter jurisdiction here. That is incorrect. The allegation in Johnson was that five defendants, all of them police officers, unlawfully beat the plaintiff. Johnson considered "the appealability of a portion of" the District Court's summary judgment order that, "though entered in a `qualified immunity' case, determine[d] only" that there was a genuine issue of material fact that three of the defendants participated in the beating. Id., at 313, 115 S.Ct. 2151.

In finding that order not a "final decision" for purposes of § 1291, the Johnson Court cited Mitchell for the proposition that only decisions turning "`on an issue of law'" are subject to immediate appeal. 515 U.S., at 313, 115 S.Ct. 2151. Though determining whether there is a genuine issue of material fact at summary judgment is a question of law, it is a legal question that sits near the law-fact divide. Or as we said in Johnson, it is a "factrelated" legal inquiry. Id., at 314, 115 S.Ct. 2151. To conduct it, a court of appeals may be required to consult a "vast pretrial record, with numerous conflicting affidavits, depositions, and other discovery materials." Id., at 316, 115 S.Ct. 2151. That process generally involves matters more within a district court's ken and may replicate inefficiently questions that will arise on appeal following final judgment. Ibid. Finding those concerns predominant, Johnson held that the collateral orders that are "final" under Mitchell turn on "abstract," rather than "fact-based," issues of law. 515 U.S., at 317, 115 S.Ct. 2151.

The 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. True, the categories of "factbased" and "abstract" legal questions used to guide the Court's decision in Johnson are not well defined. Here, however, the order denying petitioners' motion to dismiss falls well within the latter class. Reviewing that order, the Court of Appeals considered only the allegations contained within the four corners of respondent's complaint; resort to a "vast pretrial record" on petitioners' motion to dismiss was unnecessary. Id., at 316, 115 S.Ct. 2151. And determining whether respondent's complaint has the "heft" to state a claim is a task well within an appellate court's core competency. Twombly, 550 U.S., at 557, 127 S.Ct. 1955. Evaluating the sufficiency of a complaint is not a "fact-based" question of law, so the problem the Court sought to avoid in Johnson is not implicated here. The District Court's order denying petitioners' motion to dismiss is a final decision under the collateral-order doctrine over which the Court of Appeals had, and this Court has, jurisdiction. We proceed to consider the merits of petitioners' appeal.

III

In Twombly, supra, at 553-554, 127 S.Ct. 1955, the Court found it necessary first to discuss the antitrust principles implicated by the complaint. Here too we begin by taking note of the elements a plaintiff must plead to state a claim of unconstitutional discrimination against officials entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity.

In Bivens—proceeding on the theory that a right suggests a remedy—this Court "recognized for the first time an implied private action for damages against federal officers alleged to have violated a citizen's constitutional rights." Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, 534 U.S. 61, 66, 122 S.Ct. 515, 151 L.Ed.2d 456 [1948] (2001). Because implied causes of action are disfavored, the Court has been reluctant to extend Bivens liability "to any new context or new category of defendants." 534 U.S., at 68, 122 S.Ct. 515. See also Wilkie, 551 U.S., at 549-550, 127 S.Ct. 2588. That reluctance might well have disposed of respondent's First Amendment claim of religious discrimination. For while we have allowed a Bivens action to redress a violation of the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, see Davis v. Passman, 442 U.S. 228, 99 S.Ct. 2264, 60 L.Ed.2d 846 (1979), we have not found an implied damages remedy under the Free Exercise Clause. Indeed, we have declined to extend Bivens to a claim sounding in the First Amendment. Bush v. Lucas, 462 U.S. 367, 103 S.Ct. 2404, 76 L.Ed.2d 648 (1983). Petitioners do not press this argument, however, so we assume, without deciding, that respondent's First Amendment claim is actionable under Bivens.

In the limited settings where Bivens does apply, the implied cause of action is the "federal analog to suits brought against state officials under Rev. Stat. § 1979, 42 U.S.C. § 1983." Hartman, 547 U.S., at 254, n. 2, 126 S.Ct. 1695. Cf. Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 609, 119 S.Ct. 1692, 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999). Based on the rules our precedents establish, respondent correctly concedes that Government officials may not be held liable for the unconstitutional conduct of their subordinates under a theory of respondeat superior. Iqbal Brief 46 ("[I]t is undisputed that supervisory Bivens liability cannot be established solely on a theory of respondeat superior"). See Monell v. New York City Dept. of Social Servs., 436 U.S. 658, 691, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978) (finding no vicarious liability for a municipal "person" under 42 U.S.C. § 1983); see also Dunlop v. Munroe, 7 Cranch 242, 269, 3 L.Ed. 329 (1812) (a federal official's liability "will only result from his own neglect in not properly superintending the discharge" of his subordinates' duties); Robertson v. Sichel, 127 U.S. 507, 515-516, 8 S.Ct. 1286, 3 L.Ed. 203 (1888) ("A public officer or agent is not responsible for the misfeasances or position wrongs, or for the nonfeasances, or negligences, or omissions of duty, of the subagents or servants or other persons properly employed by or under him, in the discharge of his official duties"). Because vicarious liability is inapplicable to Bivens and § 1983 suits, a plaintiff must plead that each Governmentofficial defendant, through the official's own individual actions, has violated the Constitution.

The factors necessary to establish a Bivens violation will vary with the constitutional provision at issue. Where the claim is invidious discrimination in contravention of the First and Fifth Amendments, our decisions make clear that the plaintiff must plead and prove that the defendant acted with discriminatory purpose. Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, 540-541, 113 S.Ct. 2217, 124 L.Ed.2d 472 (1993) (First Amendment); Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 240, 96 S.Ct. 2040, 48 L.Ed.2d 597 (1976) (Fifth Amendment). Under extant precedent purposeful discrimination requires more than "intent as volition or intent as awareness of consequences." Personnel Administrator of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279, 99 S.Ct. 2282, 60 L.Ed.2d 870 (1979). It instead involves a decisionmaker's undertaking a course of action "`because of,' not merely `in spite of,' [the action's] adverse effects upon an identifiable group." Ibid. It follows that, to state a claim based on a violation of a clearly established right, respondent must plead sufficient factual matter to show that [1949] petitioners adopted and implemented the detention policies at issue not for a neutral, investigative reason but for the purpose of discriminating on account of race, religion, or national origin.

Respondent disagrees. He argues that, under a theory of "supervisory liability," petitioners can be liable for "knowledge and acquiescence in their subordinates' use of discriminatory criteria to make classification decisions among detainees." Iqbal Brief 45-46. That is to say, respondent believes a supervisor's mere knowledge of his subordinate's discriminatory purpose amounts to the supervisor's violating the Constitution. We reject this argument. Respondent's conception of "supervisory liability" is inconsistent with his accurate stipulation that petitioners may not be held accountable for the misdeeds of their agents. In a § 1983 suit or a Bivens action—where masters do not answer for the torts of their servants—the term "supervisory liability" is a misnomer. Absent vicarious liability, each Government official, his or her title notwithstanding, is only liable for his or her own misconduct. In the context of determining whether there is a violation of clearly established right to overcome qualified immunity, purpose rather than knowledge is required to impose Bivens liability on the subordinate for unconstitutional discrimination; the same holds true for an official charged with violations arising from his or her superintendent responsibilities.

IV

A

We turn to respondent's complaint. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2), a pleading must contain a "short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief." As the Court held in Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929, the pleading standard Rule 8 announces does not require "detailed factual allegations," but it demands more than an unadorned, the-defendant-unlawfully-harmed-me accusation. Id., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (citing Papasan v. Allain, 478 U.S. 265, 286, 106 S.Ct. 2932, 92 L.Ed.2d 209 (1986)). A pleading that offers "labels and conclusions" or "a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do." 550 U.S., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955. Nor does a complaint suffice if it tenders "naked assertion[s]" devoid of "further factual enhancement." Id., at 557, 127 S.Ct. 1955.

To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to "state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face." Id., at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955. A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged. Id., at 556, 127 S.Ct. 1955. The plausibility standard is not akin to a "probability requirement," but it asks for more than a sheer possibility that a defendant has acted unlawfully. Ibid. Where a complaint pleads facts that are "merely consistent with" a defendant's liability, it "stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of `entitlement to relief.'" Id., at 557, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (brackets omitted).

Two working principles underlie our decision in Twombly. First, the tenet that a court must accept as true all of the allegations contained in a complaint is inapplicable to legal conclusions. Threadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere conclusory statements, do not suffice. Id., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (Although for the purposes of a motion to dismiss we must take all of the factual allegations in the complaint as true, we [1950] "are not bound to accept as true a legal conclusion couched as a factual allegation" (internal quotation marks omitted)). Rule 8 marks a notable and generous departure from the hyper-technical, code-pleading regime of a prior era, but it does not unlock the doors of discovery for a plaintiff armed with nothing more than conclusions. Second, only a complaint that states a plausible claim for relief survives a motion to dismiss. Id., at 556, 127 S.Ct. 1955. Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief will, as the Court of Appeals observed, be a context-specific task that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense. 490 F.3d, at 157-158. But where the well-pleaded facts do not permit the court to infer more than the mere possibility of misconduct, the complaint has alleged—but it has not "show[n]"—"that the pleader is entitled to relief." Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 8(a)(2).

In keeping with these principles a court considering a motion to dismiss can choose to begin by identifying pleadings that, because they are no more than conclusions, are not entitled to the assumption of truth. While legal conclusions can provide the framework of a complaint, they must be supported by factual allegations. When there are well-pleaded factual allegations, a court should assume their veracity and then determine whether they plausibly give rise to an entitlement to relief.

Our decision in Twombly illustrates the two-pronged approach. There, we considered the sufficiency of a complaint alleging that incumbent telecommunications providers had entered an agreement not to compete and to forestall competitive entry, in violation of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1. Recognizing that § 1 enjoins only anticompetitive conduct "effected by a contract, combination, or conspiracy," Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752, 775, 104 S.Ct. 2731, 81 L.Ed.2d 628 (1984), the plaintiffs in Twombly flatly pleaded that the defendants "ha[d] entered into a contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry. . . and ha[d] agreed not to compete with one another." 550 U.S., at 551, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (internal quotation marks omitted). The complaint also alleged that the defendants' "parallel course of conduct . . . to prevent competition" and inflate prices was indicative of the unlawful agreement alleged. Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted).

The Court held the plaintiffs' complaint deficient under Rule 8. In doing so it first noted that the plaintiffs' assertion of an unlawful agreement was a "`legal conclusion'" and, as such, was not entitled to the assumption of truth. Id., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955. Had the Court simply credited the allegation of a conspiracy, the plaintiffs would have stated a claim for relief and been entitled to proceed perforce. The Court next addressed the "nub" of the plaintiffs' complaint—the well-pleaded, nonconclusory factual allegation of parallel behavior—to determine whether it gave rise to a "plausible suggestion of conspiracy." Id., at 565-566, 127 S.Ct. 1955. Acknowledging that parallel conduct was consistent with an unlawful agreement, the Court nevertheless concluded that it did not plausibly suggest an illicit accord because it was not only compatible with, but indeed was more likely explained by, lawful, unchoreographed free-market behavior. Id., at 567, 127 S.Ct. 1955. Because the well-pleaded fact of parallel conduct, accepted as true, did not plausibly suggest an unlawful agreement, the Court held the plaintiffs' complaint must be dismissed. Id., at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955.

B

Under Twombly's construction of Rule 8, we conclude that respondent's complaint [1951] has not "nudged [his] claims" of invidious discrimination "across the line from conceivable to plausible." Ibid.

We begin our analysis by identifying the allegations in the complaint that are not entitled to the assumption of truth. Respondent pleads that petitioners "knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject [him]" to harsh conditions of confinement "as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest." Complaint ¶ 96, App. to Pet. for Cert. 173a-174a. The complaint alleges that Ashcroft was the "principal architect" of this invidious policy, id., ¶ 10, at 157a, and that Mueller was "instrumental" in adopting and executing it, id., ¶ 11, at 157a. These bare assertions, much like the pleading of conspiracy in Twombly, amount to nothing more than a "formulaic recitation of the elements" of a constitutional discrimination claim, 550 U.S., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955, namely, that petitioners adopted a policy "`because of,' not merely `in spite of,' its adverse effects upon an identifiable group." Feeney, 442 U.S., at 279, 99 S.Ct. 2282. As such, the allegations are conclusory and not entitled to be assumed true. Twombly, supra, 550 U.S., at 554-555, 127 S.Ct. 1955. To be clear, we do not reject these bald allegations on the ground that they are unrealistic or nonsensical. We do not so characterize them any more than the Court in Twombly rejected the plaintiffs' express allegation of a "`contract, combination or conspiracy to prevent competitive entry,'" id., at 551, 127 S.Ct. 1955, because it thought that claim too chimerical to be maintained. It is the conclusory nature of respondent's allegations, rather than their extravagantly fanciful nature, that disentitles them to the presumption of truth.

We next consider the factual allegations in respondent's complaint to determine if they plausibly suggest an entitlement to relief. The complaint alleges that "the [FBI], under the direction of Defendant MUELLER, arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men . . . as part of its investigation of the events of September 11." Complaint ¶ 47, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a. It further claims that "[t]he policy of holding post-September-11th detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were `cleared' by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001." Id., ¶ 69, at 168a. Taken as true, these allegations are consistent with petitioners' purposefully designating detainees "of high interest" because of their race, religion, or national origin. But given more likely explanations, they do not plausibly establish this purpose.

The September 11 attacks were perpetrated by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers who counted themselves members in good standing of al Qaeda, an Islamic fundamentalist group. Al Qaeda was headed by another Arab Muslim—Osama bin Laden—and composed in large part of his Arab Muslim disciples. It should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims. On the facts respondent alleges the arrests Mueller oversaw were likely lawful and justified by his nondiscriminatory intent to detain aliens who were illegally present in the United States and who had potential connections to those who committed terrorist acts. As between that "obvious alternative explanation" for the arrests, Twombly, supra, at 567, 127 S.Ct. 1955, and the purposeful, invidious discrimination respondent [1952] asks us to infer, discrimination is not a plausible conclusion.

But even if the complaint's well-pleaded facts give rise to a plausible inference that respondent's arrest was the result of unconstitutional discrimination, that inference alone would not entitle respondent to relief. It is important to recall that respondent's complaint challenges neither the constitutionality of his arrest nor his initial detention in the MDC. Respondent's constitutional claims against petitioners rest solely on their ostensible "policy of holding post-September-11th detainees" in the ADMAX SHU once they were categorized as "of high interest." Complaint ¶ 69, App. to Pet. for Cert. 168a. To prevail on that theory, the complaint must contain facts plausibly showing that petitioners purposefully adopted a policy of classifying post-September-11 detainees as "of high interest" because of their race, religion, or national origin.

This the complaint fails to do. Though respondent alleges that various other defendants, who are not before us, may have labeled him a person of "of high interest" for impermissible reasons, his only factual allegation against petitioners accuses them of adopting a policy approving "restrictive conditions of confinement" for post-September-11 detainees until they were "`cleared' by the FBI." Ibid. Accepting the truth of that allegation, the complaint does not show, or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU due to their race, religion, or national origin. All it plausibly suggests is that the Nation's top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity. Respondent does not argue, nor can he, that such a motive would violate petitioners' constitutional obligations. He would need to allege more by way of factual content to "nudg[e]" his claim of purposeful discrimination "across the line from conceivable to plausible." Twombly, 550 U.S., at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955.

To be sure, respondent can attempt to draw certain contrasts between the pleadings the Court considered in Twombly and the pleadings at issue here. In Twombly, the complaint alleged general wrongdoing that extended over a period of years, id., at 551, 127 S.Ct. 1955, whereas here the complaint alleges discrete wrongs—for instance, beatings—by lower level Government actors. The allegations here, if true, and if condoned by petitioners, could be the basis for some inference of wrongful intent on petitioners' part. Despite these distinctions, respondent's pleadings do not suffice to state a claim. Unlike in Twombly, where the doctrine of respondeat superior could bind the corporate defendant, here, as we have noted, petitioners cannot be held liable unless they themselves acted on account of a constitutionally protected characteristic. Yet respondent's complaint does not contain any factual allegation sufficient to plausibly suggest petitioners' discriminatory state of mind. His pleadings thus do not meet the standard necessary to comply with Rule 8.

It is important to note, however, that we express no opinion concerning the sufficiency of respondent's complaint against the defendants who are not before us. Respondent's account of his prison ordeal alleges serious official misconduct that we need not address here. Our decision is limited to the determination that respondent's complaint does not entitle him to relief from petitioners.

C

Respondent offers three arguments that bear on our disposition of his case, but none is persuasive.

[1953] 1

Respondent first says that our decision in Twombly should be limited to pleadings made in the context of an antitrust dispute. Iqbal Brief 37-38. This argument is not supported by Twombly and is incompatible with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Though Twombly determined the sufficiency of a complaint sounding in antitrust, the decision was based on our interpretation and application of Rule 8. 550 U.S., at 554, 127 S.Ct. 1955. That Rule in turn governs the pleading standard "in all civil actions and proceedings in the United States district courts." Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 1. Our decision in Twombly expounded the pleading standard for "all civil actions," ibid., and it applies to antitrust and discrimination suits alike. See 550 U.S., at 555-556, and n. 3, 127 S.Ct. 1955.

2

Respondent next implies that our construction of Rule 8 should be tempered where, as here, the Court of Appeals has "instructed the district court to cabin discovery in such a way as to preserve" petitioners' defense of qualified immunity "as much as possible in anticipation of a summary judgment motion." Iqbal Brief 27. We have held, however, that the question presented by a motion to dismiss a complaint for insufficient pleadings does not turn on the controls placed upon the discovery process. Twombly, supra, at 559, 127 S.Ct. 1955 ("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 management given the common lament that the success of judicial supervision in checking discovery abuse has been on the modest side" (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)).

Our rejection of the careful-case-management approach is especially important in suits where Government-official defendants are entitled to assert the defense of qualified immunity. The basic thrust of the qualified-immunity doctrine is to free officials from the concerns of litigation, including "avoidance of disruptive discovery." Siegert v. Gilley, 500 U.S. 226, 236, 111 S.Ct. 1789, 114 L.Ed.2d 277 (1991) (KENNEDY, J., concurring in judgment). There are serious and legitimate reasons for this. If a Government official is to devote time to his or her duties, and to the formulation of sound and responsible policies, it is counterproductive to require the substantial diversion that is attendant to participating in litigation and making informed decisions as to how it should proceed. Litigation, though necessary to ensure that officials comply with the law, exacts heavy costs in terms of efficiency and expenditure of valuable time and resources that might otherwise be directed to the proper execution of the work of the Government. The costs of diversion are only magnified when Government officials are charged with responding to, as Judge Cabranes aptly put it, "a national and international security emergency unprecedented in the history of the American Republic." 490 F.3d, at 179.

It is no answer to these concerns to say that discovery for petitioners can be deferred while pretrial proceedings continue for other defendants. It is quite likely that, when discovery as to the other parties proceeds, it would prove necessary for petitioners and their counsel to participate in the process to ensure the case does not develop in a misleading or slanted way that causes prejudice to their position. Even if petitioners are not yet themselves subject to discovery orders, then, they would not be free from the burdens of discovery.

We decline respondent's invitation to relax the pleading requirements on the [1954] ground that the Court of Appeals promises petitioners minimally intrusive discovery. That promise provides especially cold comfort in this pleading context, where we are impelled to give real content to the concept of qualified immunity for high-level officials who must be neither deterred nor detracted from the vigorous performance of their duties. Because respondent's complaint is deficient under Rule 8, he is not entitled to discovery, cabined or otherwise.

3

Respondent finally maintains that the Federal Rules expressly allow him to allege petitioners' discriminatory intent "generally," which he equates with a conclusory allegation. Iqbal Brief 32 (citing Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 9). It follows, respondent says, that his complaint is sufficiently well pleaded because it claims that petitioners discriminated against him "on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest." Complaint ¶ 96, App. to Pet. for Cert. 172a-173a. Were we required to accept this allegation as true, respondent's complaint would survive petitioners' motion to dismiss. But the Federal Rules do not require courts to credit a complaint's conclusory statements without reference to its factual context.

It is true that Rule 9(b) requires particularity when pleading "fraud or mistake," while allowing "[m]alice, intent, knowledge, and other conditions of a person's mind [to] be alleged generally." But "generally" is a relative term. In the context of Rule 9, it is to be compared to the particularity requirement applicable to fraud or mistake. Rule 9 merely excuses a party from pleading discriminatory intent under an elevated pleading standard. It does not give him license to evade the less rigid—though still operative—strictures of Rule 8. See 5A C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1301, p. 291 (3d ed. 2004) ("[A] rigid rule requiring the detailed pleading of a condition of mind would be undesirable because, absent overriding considerations pressing for a specificity requirement, as in the case of averments of fraud or mistake, the general `short and plain statement of the claim' mandate in Rule 8(a). . . should control the second sentence of Rule 9(b)"). And Rule 8 does not empower respondent to plead the bare elements of his cause of action, affix the label "general allegation," and expect his complaint to survive a motion to dismiss.

V

We hold that respondent's complaint fails to plead sufficient facts to state a claim for purposeful and unlawful discrimination against petitioners. The Court of Appeals should decide in the first instance whether to remand to the District Court so that respondent can seek leave to amend his deficient complaint.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Justice SOUTER, with whom Justice STEVENS, Justice GINSBURG, and Justice BREYER join, dissenting.

This case is here on the uncontested assumption that Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 29 L.Ed.2d 619 (1971), allows personal liability based on a federal officer's violation of an individual's rights under the First and Fifth Amendments, and it comes to us with the explicit concession of petitioners Ashcroft and Mueller that an officer may be subject to Bivens liability as a supervisor on grounds other than respondeat [1955] superior. The Court apparently rejects this concession and, although it has no bearing on the majority's resolution of this case, does away with supervisory liability under Bivens. The majority then misapplies the pleading standard under Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007), to conclude that the complaint fails to state a claim. I respectfully dissent from both the rejection of supervisory liability as a cognizable claim in the face of petitioners' concession, and from the holding that the complaint fails to satisfy Rule 8(a)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

I

A

Respondent Iqbal was arrested in November 2001 on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and fraud in relation to identification documents, and was placed in pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F.3d 143, 147-148 (C.A.2 2007). He alleges that FBI officials carried out a discriminatory policy by designating him as a person "`of high interest'" in the investigation of the September 11 attacks solely because of his race, religion, or national origin. Owing to this designation he was placed in the detention center's Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit for over six months while awaiting the fraud trial. Id., at 148. As I will mention more fully below, Iqbal contends that Ashcroft and Mueller were at the very least aware of the discriminatory detention policy and condoned it (and perhaps even took part in devising it), thereby violating his First and Fifth Amendment rights.^[1]

Iqbal claims that on the day he was transferred to the special unit, prison guards, without provocation, "picked him up and threw him against the wall, kicked him in the stomach, punched him in the face, and dragged him across the room." First Amended Complaint in No. 04-CV-1809 (JG)(JA), ¶ 113, App. to Pet. for Cert. 176a (hereinafter Complaint). He says that after being attacked a second time he sought medical attention but was denied care for two weeks. Id., ¶¶ 187-188, at 189a. According to Iqbal's complaint, prison staff in the special unit subjected him to unjustified strip and body cavity searches, id., ¶¶ 136-140, at 181a, verbally berated him as a "`terrorist'" and "`Muslim killer,'" id., ¶ 87, at 170a-171a, refused to give him adequate food, id., ¶ 91, at 171a-172a, and intentionally turned on air conditioning during the winter and heating during the summer, id., ¶ 84, at 170a. He claims that prison staff interfered with his attempts to pray and engage in religious study, id., ¶¶ 153-154, at 183a-184a, and with his access to counsel, id., ¶¶ 168, 171, at 186a-187a.

The District Court denied Ashcroft and Mueller's motion to dismiss Iqbal's discrimination claim, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. Ashcroft and Mueller then asked this Court to grant certiorari on two questions:

"1. Whether a conclusory allegation that a cabinet-level officer or other highranking official knew of, condoned, or agreed to subject a plaintiff to allegedly unconstitutional acts purportedly committed by subordinate officials is sufficient to state individual-capacity claims against those officials under Bivens.

[1956] "2. Whether a cabinet-level officer or other high-ranking official may be held personally liable for the allegedly unconstitutional acts of subordinate officials on the ground that, as high-level supervisors, they had constructive notice of the discrimination allegedly carried out by such subordinate officials." Pet. for Cert. I.

The Court granted certiorari on both questions. The first is about pleading; the second goes to the liability standard.

In the first question, Ashcroft and Mueller did not ask whether "a cabinet-level officer or other high-ranking official" who "knew of, condoned, or agreed to subject a plaintiff to allegedly unconstitutional acts committed by subordinate officials" was subject to liability under Bivens. In fact, they conceded in their petition for certiorari that they would be liable if they had "actual knowledge" of discrimination by their subordinates and exhibited "`deliberate indifference'" to that discrimination. Pet. for Cert. 29 (quoting Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 837, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994)). Instead, they asked the Court to address whether Iqbal's allegations against them (which they call conclusory) were sufficient to satisfy Rule 8(a)(2), and in particular whether the Court of Appeals misapplied our decision in Twombly construing that rule. Pet. for Cert. 11-24.

In the second question, Ashcroft and Mueller asked this Court to say whether they could be held personally liable for the actions of their subordinates based on the theory that they had constructive notice of their subordinates' unconstitutional conduct. Id., at 25-33. This was an odd question to pose, since Iqbal has never claimed that Ashcroft and Mueller are liable on a constructive notice theory. Be that as it may, the second question challenged only one possible ground for imposing supervisory liability under Bivens. In sum, both questions assumed that a defendant could raise a Bivens claim on theories of supervisory liability other than constructive notice, and neither question asked the parties or the Court to address the elements of such liability.

The briefing at the merits stage was no different. Ashcroft and Mueller argued that the factual allegations in Iqbal's complaint were insufficient to overcome their claim of qualified immunity; they also contended that they could not be held liable on a theory of constructive notice. Again they conceded, however, that they would be subject to supervisory liability if they "had actual knowledge of the assertedly discriminatory nature of the classification of suspects as being `of high interest' and they were deliberately indifferent to that discrimination." Brief for Petitioners 50; see also Reply Brief for Petitioners 21-22. Iqbal argued that the allegations in his complaint were sufficient under Rule 8(a)(2) and Twombly, and conceded that as a matter of law he could not recover under a theory of respondeat superior. See Brief for Respondent Iqbal 46. Thus, the parties agreed as to a proper standard of supervisory liability, and the disputed question was whether Iqbal's complaint satisfied Rule 8(a)(2).

Without acknowledging the parties' agreement as to the standard of supervisory liability, the Court asserts that it must sua sponte decide the scope of supervisory liability here. Ante, at 1947-1949. I agree that, absent Ashcroft and Mueller's concession, that determination would have to be made; without knowing the elements of a supervisory liability claim, there would be no way to determine whether a plaintiff had made factual allegations amounting to grounds for relief on that claim. See Twombly, 550 U.S., at 557-558, 127 S.Ct. 1955. But deciding the scope of supervisory [1957] Bivens liability in this case is uncalled for. There are several reasons, starting with the position Ashcroft and Mueller have taken and following from it.

First, Ashcroft and Mueller have, as noted, made the critical concession that a supervisor's knowledge of a subordinate's unconstitutional conduct and deliberate indifference to that conduct are grounds for Bivens liability. Iqbal seeks to recover on a theory that Ashcroft and Mueller at least knowingly acquiesced (and maybe more than acquiesced) in the discriminatory acts of their subordinates; if he can show this, he will satisfy Ashcroft and Mueller's own test for supervisory liability. See Farmer, supra, at 842, 114 S.Ct. 1970 (explaining that a prison official acts with "deliberate indifference" if "the official acted or failed to act despite his knowledge of a substantial risk of serious harm"). We do not normally override a party's concession, see, e.g., United States v. International Business Machines Corp., 517 U.S. 843, 855, 116 S.Ct. 1793, 135 L.Ed.2d 124 (1996) (holding that "[i]t would be inappropriate for us to [e]xamine in this case, without the benefit of the parties' briefing," an issue the Government had conceded), and doing so is especially inappropriate when, as here, the issue is unnecessary to decide the case, see infra, at 1958-1959. I would therefore accept Ashcroft and Mueller's concession for purposes of this case and proceed to consider whether the complaint alleges at least knowledge and deliberate indifference.

Second, because of the concession, we have received no briefing or argument on the proper scope of supervisory liability, much less the full-dress argument we normally require. Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 676-677, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting). We consequently are in no position to decide the precise contours of supervisory liability here, this issue being a complicated one that has divided the Courts of Appeals. See infra, at 1957-1959. This Court recently remarked on the danger of "bad decisionmaking" when the briefing on a question is "woefully inadequate," Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. ___, ___, 129 S.Ct. 808, 819, 172 L.Ed.2d 565 (2009), yet today the majority answers a question with no briefing at all. The attendant risk of error is palpable.

Finally, the Court's approach is most unfair to Iqbal. He was entitled to rely on Ashcroft and Mueller's concession, both in their petition for certiorari and in their merits briefs, that they could be held liable on a theory of knowledge and deliberate indifference. By overriding that concession, the Court denies Iqbal a fair chance to be heard on the question.

B

The majority, however, does ignore the concession. According to the majority, because Iqbal concededly cannot recover on a theory of respondeat superior, it follows that he cannot recover under any theory of supervisory liability. Ante, at 1948-1949. The majority says that in a Bivens action, "where masters do not answer for the torts of their servants," "the term `supervisory liability' is a misnomer," and that "[a]bsent vicarious liability, each Government official, his or her title notwithstanding, is only liable for his or her own misconduct." Ibid. Lest there be any mistake, in these words the majority is not narrowing the scope of supervisory liability; it is eliminating Bivens supervisory liability entirely. The nature of a supervisory liability theory is that the supervisor may be liable, under certain conditions, for the wrongdoing of his subordinates, and it is this very principle that the majority rejects. Ante, at 1952 ("[P]etitioners cannot be held liable unless they themselves [1958] acted on account of a constitutionally protected characteristic").

The dangers of the majority's readiness to proceed without briefing and argument are apparent in its cursory analysis, which rests on the assumption that only two outcomes are possible here: respondeat superior liability, in which "an employer is subject to liability for torts committed by employees while acting within the scope of their employment," Restatement (Third) of Agency § 2.04 (2005), or no supervisory liability at all. The dichotomy is false. Even if an employer is not liable for the actions of his employee solely because the employee was acting within the scope of employment, there still might be conditions to render a supervisor liable for the conduct of his subordinate. See, e.g., Whitfield v. Melendez-Rivera, 431 F.3d 1, 14 (C.A.1 2005) (distinguishing between respondeat superior liability and supervisory liability); Bennett v. Eastpointe, 410 F.3d 810, 818 (C.A.6 2005) (same); Richardson v. Goord, 347 F.3d 431, 435 (C.A.2 2003) (same); Hall v. Lombardi, 996 F.2d 954, 961 (C.A.8 1993) (same).

In fact, there is quite a spectrum of possible tests for supervisory liability: it could be imposed where a supervisor has actual knowledge of a subordinate's constitutional violation and acquiesces, see, e.g., Baker v. Monroe Twp., 50 F.3d 1186, 1194 (C.A.3 1995); Woodward v. Worland, 977 F.2d 1392, 1400 (C.A.10 1992); or where supervisors "`know about the conduct and facilitate it, approve it, condone it, or turn a blind eye for fear of what they might see,'" International Action Center v. United States, 365 F.3d 20, 28 (C.A.D.C. 2004) (Roberts, J.) (quoting Jones v. Chicago, 856 F.2d 985, 992 (C.A.7 1988) (Posner, J.)); or where the supervisor has no actual knowledge of the violation but was reckless in his supervision of the subordinate, see, e.g., Hall, supra, at 961; or where the supervisor was grossly negligent, see, e.g., Lipsett v. University of Puerto Rico, 864 F.2d 881, 902 (C.A.1 1988). I am unsure what the general test for supervisory liability should be, and in the absence of briefing and argument I am in no position to choose or devise one.

Neither is the majority, but what is most remarkable about its foray into supervisory liability is that its conclusion has no bearing on its resolution of the case. The majority says that all of the allegations in the complaint that Ashcroft and Mueller authorized, condoned, or even were aware of their subordinates' discriminatory conduct are "conclusory" and therefore are "not entitled to be assumed true." Ante, at 1951. As I explain below, this conclusion is unsound, but on the majority's understanding of Rule 8(a)(2) pleading standards, even if the majority accepted Ashcroft and Mueller's concession and asked whether the complaint sufficiently alleges knowledge and deliberate indifference, it presumably would still conclude that the complaint fails to plead sufficient facts and must be dismissed.^[2]

II

Given petitioners' concession, the complaint satisfies Rule 8(a)(2). Ashcroft and Mueller admit they are liable for their subordinates' conduct if they "had actual knowledge of the assertedly discriminatory nature of the classification of suspects as being `of high interest' and they were deliberately indifferent to that discrimination." Brief for Petitioners 50. Iqbal alleges [1959] that after the September 11 attacks the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men," Complaint ¶ 47, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a, that many of these men were designated by high-ranking FBI officials as being "`of high interest,'" id., ¶¶ 48, 50, at 164a, and that in many cases, including Iqbal's, this designation was made "because of the race, religion, and national origin of the detainees, and not because of any evidence of the detainees' involvement in supporting terrorist activity," id., ¶ 49. The complaint further alleges that Ashcroft was the "principal architect of the policies and practices challenged," id., ¶ 10, at 157a, and that Mueller "was instrumental in the adoption, promulgation, and implementation of the policies and practices challenged," id., ¶ 11. According to the complaint, Ashcroft and Mueller "knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject [Iqbal] to these conditions of confinement as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest." Id., ¶ 96, at 172a-173a. The complaint thus alleges, at a bare minimum, that Ashcroft and Mueller knew of and condoned the discriminatory policy their subordinates carried out. Actually, the complaint goes further in alleging that Ashcroft and Muller affirmatively acted to create the discriminatory detention policy. If these factual allegations are true, Ashcroft and Mueller were, at the very least, aware of the discriminatory policy being implemented and deliberately indifferent to it.

Ashcroft and Mueller argue that these allegations fail to satisfy the "plausibility standard" of Twombly. They contend that Iqbal's claims are implausible because such high-ranking officials "tend not to be personally involved in the specific actions of lower-level officers down the bureaucratic chain of command." Brief for Petitioners 28. But this response bespeaks a fundamental misunderstanding of the enquiry that Twombly demands. Twombly does not require a court at the motion-to-dismiss stage to consider whether the factual allegations are probably true. We made it clear, on the contrary, that a court must take the allegations as true, no matter how skeptical the court may be. See Twombly, 550 U.S., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (a court must proceed "on the assumption that all the allegations in the complaint are true (even if doubtful in fact)"); id., at 556, 127 S.Ct. 1955 ("[A] well-pleaded complaint may proceed even if it strikes a savvy judge that actual proof of the facts alleged is improbable"); see also Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U.S. 319, 327, 109 S.Ct. 1827, 104 L.Ed.2d 338 (1989) ("Rule 12(b)(6) does not countenance . . . dismissals based on a judge's disbelief of a complaint's factual allegations"). The sole exception to this rule lies with allegations that are sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it: claims about little green men, or the plaintiff's recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel. That is not what we have here.

Under Twombly, the relevant question is whether, assuming the factual allegations are true, the plaintiff has stated a ground for relief that is plausible. That is, in Twombly's words, a plaintiff must "allege facts" that, taken as true, are "suggestive of illegal conduct." 550 U.S., at 564, n. 8, 127 S.Ct. 1955. In Twombly, we were faced with allegations of a conspiracy to violate § 1 of the Sherman Act through parallel conduct. The difficulty was that the conduct alleged was "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." Id., at 554, 127 S.Ct. 1955. We held that in [1960] that sort of circumstance, "[a]n allegation of parallel conduct is . . . 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 enhancement it stops short of the line between possibility and plausibility of `entitlement to relief.'" Id., at 557, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (brackets omitted). Here, by contrast, the allegations in the complaint are neither confined to naked legal conclusions nor consistent with legal conduct. The complaint alleges that FBI officials discriminated against Iqbal solely on account of his race, religion, and national origin, and it alleges the knowledge and deliberate indifference that, by Ashcroft and Mueller's own admission, are sufficient to make them liable for the illegal action. Iqbal's complaint therefore contains "enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face." Id., at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955.

I do not understand the majority to disagree with this understanding of "plausibility" under Twombly. Rather, the majority discards the allegations discussed above with regard to Ashcroft and Mueller as conclusory, and is left considering only two statements in the complaint: that "the [FBI], under the direction of Defendant MUELLER, arrested and detained thousands of Arab Muslim men . . . as part of its investigation of the events of September 11," Complaint ¶ 47, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a, and that "[t]he policy of holding post-September-11th detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were `cleared' by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001," id., ¶ 69, at 168a. See ante, at 1951. I think the majority is right in saying that these allegations suggest only that Ashcroft and Mueller "sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity," ante, at 1952, and that this produced "a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims," ante, at 1951-1952. And I agree that the two allegations selected by the majority, standing alone, do not state a plausible entitlement to relief for unconstitutional discrimination.

But these allegations do not stand alone as the only significant, nonconclusory statements in the complaint, for the complaint contains many allegations linking Ashcroft and Mueller to the discriminatory practices of their subordinates. See Complaint ¶10, App. to Pet. for Cert. 157a (Ashcroft was the "principal architect" of the discriminatory policy); id., ¶ 11 (Mueller was "instrumental" in adopting and executing the discriminatory policy); id., ¶ 96, at 172a-173a (Ashcroft and Mueller "knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject" Iqbal to harsh conditions "as a matter of policy, solely on account of [his] religion, race, and/or national origin and for no legitimate penological interest").

The majority says that these are "bare assertions" that, "much like the pleading of conspiracy in Twombly, amount to nothing more than a `formulaic recitation of the elements' of a constitutional discrimination claim" and therefore are "not entitled to be assumed true." Ante, at 1951 (quoting Twombly, supra, at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955). The fallacy of the majority's position, however, lies in looking at the relevant assertions in isolation. The complaint contains specific allegations that, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Chief of the FBI's International Terrorism Operations Section and the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the FBI's New York Field Office implemented a policy that discriminated against Arab Muslim men, including Iqbal, solely on account of their race, religion, or national origin. See [1961] Complaint ¶¶ 47-53, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a-165a. Viewed in light of these subsidiary allegations, the allegations singled out by the majority as "conclusory" are no such thing. Iqbal's claim is not that Ashcroft and Mueller "knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject" him to a discriminatory practice that is left undefined; his allegation is that "they knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed to subject" him to a particular, discrete, discriminatory policy detailed in the complaint. Iqbal does not say merely that Ashcroft was the architect of some amorphous discrimination, or that Mueller was instrumental in an ill-defined constitutional violation; he alleges that they helped to create the discriminatory policy he has described. Taking the complaint as a whole, it gives Ashcroft and Mueller "`fair notice of what the . . . claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.'" Twombly, 550 U.S., at 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955 (quoting Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 47, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957) (omission in original)).

That aside, the majority's holding that the statements it selects are conclusory cannot be squared with its treatment of certain other allegations in the complaint as nonconclusory. For example, the majority takes as true the statement that "[t]he policy of holding post-September-11th detainees in highly restrictive conditions of confinement until they were `cleared' by the FBI was approved by Defendants ASHCROFT and MUELLER in discussions in the weeks after September 11, 2001." Complaint ¶ 69, App. to Pet. for Cert. 168a; see ante, at 1951. This statement makes two points: (1) after September 11, the FBI held certain detainees in highly restrictive conditions, and (2) Ashcroft and Mueller discussed and approved these conditions. If, as the majority says, these allegations are not conclusory, then I cannot see why the majority deems it merely conclusory when Iqbal alleges that (1) after September 11, the FBI designated Arab Muslim detainees as being of "`high interest'" "because of the race, religion, and national origin of the detainees, and not because of any evidence of the detainees' involvement in supporting terrorist activity," Complaint ¶¶ 48-50, App. to Pet. for Cert. 164a, and (2) Ashcroft and Mueller "knew of, condoned, and willfully and maliciously agreed" to that discrimination, id., ¶ 96, at 172a. By my lights, there is no principled basis for the majority's disregard of the allegations linking Ashcroft and Mueller to their subordinates' discrimination.

I respectfully dissent.

Justice BREYER, dissenting.

I agree with Justice SOUTER and join his dissent. I write separately to point out that, like the Court, I believe it important to prevent unwarranted litigation from interfering with "the proper execution of the work of the Government." Ante, at 1953. But I cannot find in that need adequate justification for the Court's interpretation of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007), and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8. The law, after all, provides trial courts with other legal weapons designed to prevent unwarranted interference. As the Second Circuit explained, where a Government defendant asserts a qualified immunity defense, a trial court, responsible for managing a case and "mindful of the need to vindicate the purpose of the qualified immunity defense," can structure discovery in ways that diminish the risk of imposing unwarranted burdens upon public officials. See Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F.3d 143, 158 (2007). A district court, for example, can begin discovery with lower level government defendants before determining whether a case can be made to allow [1962] discovery related to higher level government officials. See ibid. Neither the briefs nor the Court's opinion provides convincing grounds for finding these alternative case-management tools inadequate, either in general or in the case before us. For this reason, as well as for the independently sufficient reasons set forth in Justice SOUTER's opinion, I would affirm the Second Circuit.

[1] Iqbal makes no claim against Ashcroft and Mueller based simply on his right, as a pretrial detainee, to be free from punishment prior to an adjudication of guilt on the fraud charges. See Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 535, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979).

[2] If I am mistaken, and the majority's rejection of the concession is somehow outcome determinative, then its approach is even more unfair to Iqbal than previously explained, see. supra, at 1957, for Iqbal had no reason to argue the (apparently dispositive) supervisory liability standard in light of the concession.

[717] [718] Edith Barnett, Washington, D.C., for plaintiffs-appellants.

James I. Rubin, Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellees.

Before POSNER and EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judges, and ESCHBACH, Senior Circuit Judge.

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied April 4, 1986.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

This class action charges the State of Illinois with sex discrimination in employment, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The named plaintiffs are two associations of nurses plus 21 individuals, mostly but not entirely female, who work for the state in jobs such as nursing and typing that are filled primarily by women. The suit is on behalf of all state employees in these job classifications. The precise allegations of the complaint will require our careful attention later, but for now it is enough to note that they include as an essential element the charge that the state pays workers in predominantly male job classifications a higher wage not justified by any difference in the relative worth of the predominantly male and the predominantly female jobs in the state's roster.

[719] The complaint was filed in May 1984, and before the state answered, an amended complaint was filed early in July. Less than a month later the state moved to dismiss the complaint or, in the alternative, for summary judgment. In November the plaintiffs filed a memorandum in opposition to the state's motion, to which they attached exhibits not obtained in the course of pretrial discovery — for there had been no discovery. In April 1985 the district judge dismissed the complaint under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6) but without ruling on the state's alternative request for summary judgment, 606 F.Supp. 1313. The ground for dismissal was that the complaint pleaded a comparable worth case and that a failure to pay employees in accordance with comparable worth does not violate federal antidiscrimination law. The plaintiffs appeal. They argue that their case is not (or perhaps not just) a comparable worth case and that in characterizing the complaint as he did the district judge terminated the lawsuit by a semantic manipulation. The state both defends the judge's ground for dismissal and argues that we can equally well affirm on the ground that the state's motion for summary judgment should have been granted.

Comparable worth is not a legal concept, but a shorthand expression for the movement to raise the ratio of wages in traditionally women's jobs to wages in traditionally men's jobs. Its premises are both historical and cognitive. The historical premise is that a society politically and culturally dominated by men steered women into certain jobs and kept the wages in those jobs below what the jobs were worth, precisely because most of the holders were women. The cognitive premise is that analytical techniques exist for determining the relative worth of jobs that involve different levels of skill, effort, risk, responsibility, etc. These premises are vigorously disputed on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Economists point out that unless employers forbid women to compete for the higher-paying, traditionally men's jobs — which would violate federal law — women will switch into those jobs until the only difference in wages between traditionally women's jobs and traditionally men's jobs will be that necessary to equate the supply of workers in each type of job to the demand. Economists have conducted studies which show that virtually the entire difference in the average hourly wage of men and women, including that due to the fact that men and women tend to be concentrated in different types of job, can be explained by the fact that most women take considerable time out of the labor force in order to take care of their children. As a result they tend to invest less in their "human capital" (earning capacity); and since part of any wage is a return on human capital, they tend therefore to be found in jobs that pay less. Consistently with this hypothesis, the studies find that women who have never married earn as much as men who have never married. To all this the advocates of comparable worth reply that although there are no longer explicit barriers to women's entering traditionally men's jobs, cultural and psychological barriers remain as a result of which many though not all women internalize men's expectations regarding jobs appropriate for women and therefore invest less in their human capital.

On the cognitive question economists point out that the ratio of wages in different jobs is determined by the market rather than by any a priori conception of relative merit, in just the same way that the ratio of the price of caviar to the price of cabbage is determined by relative scarcity rather than relative importance to human welfare. Upsetting the market equilibrium by imposing such a conception would have costly consequences, some of which might undercut the ultimate goals of the comparable worth movement. If the movement should cause wages in traditionally men's jobs to be depressed below their market level and wages in traditionally women's jobs to be jacked above their market level, women will have less incentive to enter traditionally men's fields and more to enter traditionally women's fields. Analysis cannot stop there, because the change in relative [720] wages will send men in the same direction: fewer men will enter the traditionally men's jobs, more the traditionally women's jobs. As a result there will be more room for women in traditionally men's jobs and at the same time fewer opportunities for women in traditionally women's jobs — especially since the number of those jobs will shrink as employers are induced by the higher wage to substitute capital for labor inputs (e.g., more word processors, fewer secretaries). Labor will be allocated less efficiently; men and women alike may be made worse off.

Against this the advocates of comparable worth urge that collective bargaining, public regulation of wages and hours, and the lack of information and mobility of some workers make the market model an inaccurate description of how relative wages are determined and how they influence the choice of jobs. The point has particular force when applied to a public employer such as the State of Illinois, which does not have the same incentives that a private firm would have to use labor efficiently.

It should be clear from this brief summary that the issue of comparable worth (on which see the discussion and references in Paul Weiler, The Uses and Limits of Comparable Worth in the Pursuit of Pay Equity for Women, Discussion Paper No. 15, Program in Law and Economics, Harvard Law School, November 1985) is not of the sort that judges are well equipped to resolve intelligently or that we should lightly assume has been given to us to resolve by Title VII or the Constitution. An employer (private or public) that simply pays the going wage in each of the different types of job in its establishment, and makes no effort to discourage women from applying for particular jobs or to steer them toward particular jobs, would be justifiably surprised to discover that it may be violating federal law because each wage rate and therefore the ratio between them have been found to be determined by cultural or psychological factors attributable to the history of male domination of society; that it has to hire a consultant to find out how it must, regardless of market conditions, change the wages it pays, in order to achieve equity between traditionally male and traditionally female jobs; and that it must pay backpay, to boot. We need not tarry over the question of law presented by this example because as we understand the plaintiffs' position it is not that a mere failure to rectify traditional wage disparities between predominantly male and predominantly female jobs violates federal law. The circuits that have considered this contention have rejected it, see Spaulding v. University of Washington, 740 F.2d 686, 706-07 (9th Cir.1984); Lemons v. City & County of Denver, 620 F.2d 228 (10th Cir.1980); Christensen v. Iowa, 563 F.2d 353 (8th Cir.1977), and the AFSCME case discussed below; we shall see shortly that this rejection may be compelled by the Supreme Court's decisions in the Davis and Feeney cases.

The next question is whether a failure to achieve comparable worth — granted that it would not itself be a violation of law — might permit an inference of deliberate and therefore unlawful discrimination, as distinct from passive acceptance of a market-determined disparity in wages. The starting point for analyzing this question must be County of Washington v. Gunther, 452 U.S. 161, 101 S.Ct. 2242, 68 L.Ed.2d 751 (1981). Women employed to guard female prisoners were paid less than men employed to guard male prisoners. Since male prison inmates are more dangerous than female ones and since each male guard on average guarded ten times as many prisoners as each female guard, the jobs were not the same. Therefore, paying the male guards more could not violate the Equal Pay Act of 1963, 29 U.S.C. § 206(d), which requires equal pay only for equal work. The issue was whether it could violate Title VII, and the Court held that it could. A comparable worth study figured in this conclusion. The plaintiffs had alleged (and the allegation had to be taken as true for purposes of appeal, because the complaint had been dismissed, as in this case, for failure to state a claim) that the county had conducted a comparable worth [721] study and had determined that female guards should be paid 95 percent of what male guards were paid; that it had then decided to pay them only 70 percent; "and that the failure of the county to pay [the plaintiffs] the full evaluated worth of their jobs can be proved to be attributable to intentional sex discrimination. Thus, [the plaintiffs'] suit does not require a court to make its own subjective assessment of the value of the male and female guard jobs, or to attempt by statistical technique or other method to quantify the effects of sex discrimination on the wage rates." 452 U.S. at 181, 101 S.Ct. at 2253-54 (footnote omitted).

All that this seems to mean, as the dissenting Justices pointed out, is "that even absent a showing of equal work, there is a cause of action under Title VII when there is direct evidence that an employer has intentionally depressed a woman's salary because she is a woman. The decision today does not approve a cause of action based on a comparison of the wage rates of dissimilar jobs." Id. at 204, 101 S.Ct. at 2265 (emphasis in original). The relevance of a comparable worth study in proving sex discrimination is that it may provide the occasion on which the employer is forced to declare his intentions toward his female employees. In Gunther the county accepted (it was alleged) the recommendation of its comparable worth consultant regarding the male guards — decided to pay them "the full evaluated worth of their jobs" — but then rejected the recommendation regarding the female guards and did so because of "intentional sex discrimination," that is, because they were female, not because they had easier jobs or jobs that, for any reason, the market valued below the guarding of male prisoners (however a comparable worth consultant might value them).

The State of Illinois asks us to limit the teaching of Gunther to cases where the employer has accepted the recommendation of the comparable worth consultant with respect to the male job classifications. But that would be to take undue liberties with the Supreme Court's decision. The dissenting Justices pointed out that in limiting the Equal Pay Act to cases of equal work Congress had deliberately rejected liability based on the concept of comparable worth, and they argued that Congress had not intended to reverse field on the issue when it enacted Title VII a year later. The majority rejected this argument but left open "the precise contours of lawsuits challenging sex discrimination in compensation under Title VII." 452 U.S. at 181, 101 S.Ct. at 2254. It used the facts alleged in the case to argue that the dissenting Justices were exaggerating the impact of the decision on employers, but did not suggest that its holding was limited to cases with the same facts. So limited, its only effect would be to discourage employers from commissioning comparable worth studies.

Gunther suggests the type of evidence that is sufficient but perhaps not necessary to establish sex discrimination in wages for different work. A more recent case out of the State of Washington, American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) v. Washington, 770 F.2d 1401 (9th Cir.1985), suggests the type of evidence that is insufficient. The state's traditional policy had been to pay state employees the prevailing market rates of pay. Beginning in 1974, however, the state commissioned a series of comparable worth studies, each of which found that employees in predominantly female job classifications were paid about 20 percent less than employees in predominantly male job classifications judged to be of comparable worth. Eventually the state passed legislation providing for the phasing in over a decade of a wage system based on comparable worth. The suit charged that the state's failure to act sooner was a form of discrimination. The case was tried and the plaintiffs won in the district court, but the Ninth Circuit reversed. It held that a decision to pay market wages is not discriminatory, that "comparable worth statistics alone are insufficient to establish the requisite inference of discriminatory motive," id. at 1407, and that "isolated incidents" (id.) of intentional [722] discrimination in the form of help-wanted ads specifying the sex of the applicant were not enough to convert the case into one of wage discrimination across different jobs.

The AFSCME case resembles our hypothetical case of the firm accused of sex discrimination merely because it pays market wages. AFSCME shows that such a case is not actionable under Title VII even if the employer is made aware that its pattern of wages departs from the principle of comparable worth to the disadvantage of women (plus the occasional male occupant of a traditionally woman's job) and even if the employer is not so much a prisoner of the market that it cannot alter its wages in the direction of comparable worth, as eventually the State of Washington did. The critical thing lacking in AFSCME was evidence that the state decided not to raise the wages of particular workers because most of those workers were female. Without such evidence, to infer a violation of Title VII from the fact that the state had conducted a comparable worth study would, again, just discourage such studies.

The plaintiffs can get no mileage out of casting a comparable worth case as an equal protection case. The Supreme Court held in Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 96 S.Ct. 2040, 48 L.Ed.2d 597 (1976), that the equal protection clause is violated only by intentional discrimination; the fact that a law or official practice adopted for a lawful purpose has a racially differential impact is not enough. The Court applied this principle to sex discrimination in Personnel Administrator v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 99 S.Ct. 2282, 60 L.Ed.2d 870 (1979). Massachusetts had a law giving preference in state employment to veterans. The preference was applicable to female as well as male veterans but of course most veterans are male. But as the purpose of the law was to benefit veterans of either sex rather than to favor men over women, the plaintiff's constitutional challenge failed. "`[D]iscriminatory purpose' ... implies more than intent as volition or intent as awareness of consequences. It implies that the decisionmaker ... selected or reaffirmed a particular course of action at least in part `because of,' not merely `in spite of,' its adverse effects upon an identifiable group." Id. at 279, 99 S.Ct. at 2296 (citation and footnotes omitted).

These holdings cast additional light on the contention that intentional discrimination can be inferred from the state's failure to eliminate wage disparities shown by the comparable worth report. Knowledge of a disparity is not the same thing as an intent to cause or maintain it; if for example the state's intention was to pay market wages, its knowledge that the consequence would be that men got higher wages on average than women and that the difference might exceed any premium attributable to a difference in relative worth would not make it guilty of intentionally discriminating against women. Similarly, even if the failure to act on the comparable worth study could be regarded as "reaffirming" the state's commitment to pay market wages, this would not be enough to demonstrate discriminatory purpose. To demonstrate such a purpose the failure to act would have to be motivated at least in part by a desire to benefit men at the expense of women.

Neither Davis nor Feeney were Title VII cases, a point emphasized in Davis. See 426 U.S. at 238-39, 96 S.Ct. at 2046-47. But when intentional discrimination is charged under Title VII the inquiry is the same as in an equal protection case. The difference between the statutory and constitutional prohibitions becomes important only when a practice is challenged not because it is intended to hurt women (say), but because it hurts them inadvertently and is not justified by the employer's needs — when, in short, the challenge is based on a theory of "disparate impact," as distinct from "disparate treatment" (= intentional discrimination). The plaintiffs in this case, however, have said that they are proceeding on the basis of disparate treatment rather than disparate impact. Their decision is understandable. In the usual disparate-impact case the plaintiff challenges [723] some job qualification — for example, that the applicant have a high-school diploma, or pass an entrance exam — as disproportionately excluding blacks or some other protected group, and the issue is whether the qualification is reasonably necessary for the job, in which event it is lawful notwithstanding its exclusionary effect. See, e.g., Aguilera v. Cook County Police & Corrections Merit Bd., 760 F.2d 844, 846-47 (7th Cir.1985), and cases cited there. It is not apparent what the analogy to an exclusionary job qualification would be in this case.

Another point is that the Bennett Amendment to Title VII (the last sentence in 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(h)) authorizes employers to pay different wages to men and women provided that the difference would be lawful under the Equal Pay Act, which allows unequal pay for equal work if the inequality results from "any ... factor other than sex," 29 U.S.C. § 206(d)(1)(iv). The Supreme Court in Gunther assumed without quite deciding that the Bennett Amendment allows an employer charged (necessarily under Title VII rather than the Equal Pay Act) with paying unequal wages for unequal work to defend by showing that the inequality is based on something other than sex, even if the result is a disparate impact. See 452 U.S. at 171, 101 S.Ct. at 2249. This reading would confine the scope of Title VII in a case such as the present to intentional discrimination.

So if all that the plaintiffs in this case are complaining about is the State of Illinois' failure to implement a comparable worth study, they have no case and it was properly dismissed. We must therefore consider what precisely they are complaining about. Our task would be easier if the complaint had been drafted with the brevity that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure envisage though do not require. Before the era of modern pleading ushered in by the promulgation of the rules in 1938, a plaintiff to survive a motion to dismiss the complaint had to plead facts which if true showed that his legal rights had been invaded. The problem was that without pretrial discovery, which ordinarily could not be conducted before the complaint was filed, the plaintiff might not know enough facts to be able to make the required showing. For fact pleading the federal rules substituted notice pleading. The complaint would have to indicate the nature of the plaintiff's claim with only enough specificity to enable the parties to determine the preclusive effect of a judgment disposing of the claim ("a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief," Rule 8(a)(2)). The Appendix of Forms to the federal rules illustrates with a complaint for negligence that, so far as the invasion of the plaintiff's legal rights are concerned, says only: "On June 1, 1936, in a public highway called Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts, defendant negligently drove a motor vehicle against plaintiff who was then crossing said highway." Form 9, ¶ 2; and see Rule 84 ("the forms contained in the Appendix of Forms are sufficient under the rules and are intended to indicate the simplicity and brevity of statement which the rules contemplate"). The plaintiff was expected to use pretrial discovery to gather the facts showing the defendant's negligence and the defendant could serve contention interrogatories on the plaintiff to learn the theory behind the claim. See Rule 33(b), and Note of Advisory Committee to the 1970 amendment thereto. When discovery was complete, a pretrial order would be issued formulating the issues for trial; this order would perform many of the functions of the complaint in a system of fact pleading. See Rule 16. See generally Wright, The Law of Federal Courts § 68 (4th ed. 1983).

The idea of "a plain and short statement of the claim" has not caught on. Few complaints follow the models in the Appendix of Forms. Plaintiffs' lawyers, knowing that some judges read a complaint as soon as it is filed in order to get a sense of the suit, hope by pleading facts to "educate" (that is to say, influence) the judge with regard to the nature and probable merits of the case, and also hope to set the stage for an advantageous settlement by showing the defendant what a powerful case they [724] intend to prove. The pleading of facts is well illustrated by the present case. The complaint is twenty pages long and has a hundred page appendix (the comparable worth study).

A plaintiff who files a long and detailed complaint may plead himself out of court by including factual allegations which if true show that his legal rights were not invaded. Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Sales, Inc. v. Avondale Shipyards, Inc., 677 F.2d 1045, 1050 (5th Cir.1982); Associated Builders, Inc. v. Alabama Power Co., 505 F.2d 97, 100 (5th Cir.1974); Orthmann v. Apple River Campground, Inc., 757 F.2d 909, 915 (7th Cir.1985) (dictum); 5 Wright & Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1357, at p. 604 (1969). The district judge thought the plaintiffs had done that here. Let us see.

The key paragraph of the complaint is paragraph 9, which reads as follows:

Defendants State of Illinois, its Departments and other Agencies subject to the State Personnel Code, and State Officials, have intentionally discriminated and continue to intentionally discriminate against female state employees in the terms and conditions of their employment because of their sex and because of their employment in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications. Defendants have intentionally discriminated and continue to discriminate against male state employees because of their employment in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications. The acts, practices and policies of discrimination for which defendants are responsible include, but are not limited to, the following:

(a) Use of a sex-biased system of pay and classification which results in and perpetuates discrimination in compensation against women employed in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications;

(b) Use of a sex-biased system of pay and classification which, because it results in and perpetuates discrimination in compensation against women employed in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications, adversely affects males employed in such historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications;

(c) Compensation at lower rates of pay of female employees in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications which are or have been evaluated as being of comparable, equal, or greater worth than historically male-dominated sex-segregated job classifications which receive higher rates of pay;

(d) Compensation at lower rates of pay of male employees in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications which are or have been evaluated as being of comparable, equal, or greater worth than historically male sex-segregated job classifications which receive higher rates of pay;

(e) Compensation at lower rates of pay of female employees than male employees performing work of equal skill, effort and responsibility under similar working conditions;

(f) More favorable treatment in compensation of male state employees than of similarly situated female employees;

(g) Discrimination in classification.

If this were the entire charging part of the complaint, there would be no question of dismissing it for failure to state a claim. The paragraph initially charges the state with intentional discrimination against its female employees, because of their sex; and this, standing alone, would be quite enough to state a claim under Title VII. It continues, "and because of their employment in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications," and then adds a claim on behalf of male employees in those classifications. The continuation could be interpreted as an allegation that the state's failure to adopt a wage scale based on the principle of comparable worth violates Title VII, and if so fails to state a claim. But the mention of "sex-segregated" blurs the picture. If the state has deliberately segregated jobs by sex, it has violated Title VII. Anyway a complaint [725] cannot be dismissed merely because it includes invalid claims along with a valid one. Nothing is more common.

Subparagraphs (a) through (g) present a list of particular discriminatory practices; and since they are merely illustrative ("not limited to"), the complaint would not fail even if none of them were actionable. Some are, some aren't. If (a), the "use of a sex-biased system for pay and classification which results in and perpetuates discrimination in compensation against women employed in historically female-dominated sex-segregated job classifications," just means that the state is paying wages determined by the market rather than by the principle of comparable worth, it states no claim. But if it means to allege that the state has departed from the market measure on grounds of sex — not only paying higher than market wages in predominantly male job classifications and only market wages in predominantly female classifications, but keeping women from entering the predominantly male jobs ("sex-segregated") — it states a claim. Subparagraph (b) adds nothing. If the state is discriminating against women by maintaining unwarranted wage differentials between predominantly male and predominantly female jobs, any men who happen to find themselves in predominantly female jobs will be, as it were, dragged down with the women — will be incidental victims of a discrimination targeted against others.

Subparagraph (c) is an effort to fit the case to the mold of Gunther. The critical difference, however, is that here the state is not alleged to have "evaluated" any of the predominantly female job classifications as being of comparable worth to predominantly male classifications. The Illinois Commission on the Status of Women, a public body, commissioned a comparable worth study which found the same sort of disparities that other comparable worth studies have found. The state itself — meaning the officials responsible for setting wage rates — has yet to reconfigure its wage system in accordance with the findings of the study, which is attached as an appendix to the complaint and is the evaluation to which paragraph 9(c) refers. But as we said earlier, the failure to accept the recommendations in a comparable worth study is not actionable. Paragraph 9(c) thus fails to state a claim — as does (d), which is the same as (c) except that it, like subparagraph (b), complains on behalf of male occupants of predominantly female jobs.

Subparagraphs (e) and (f) are inscrutable. If they complained about payment of unequal pay for the same work they would state a claim under the Equal Pay Act. But that Act is not cited in the complaint, perhaps deliberately, and the substitution of "work of equal skill" etc. for "equal work ... of equal skill" etc. may also be deliberate. The intention may be to claim that different pay for different but comparable work violates Title VII — and if so this is a comparable worth claim by a different name, and fails. However, when a defendant is unclear about the meaning of a particular allegation in the complaint, the proper course is not to move to dismiss but to move for a more definite statement. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(e); United States v. Employing Plasterers Ass'n, 347 U.S. 186, 189, 74 S.Ct. 452, 454, 98 L.Ed. 618 (1954).

That leaves subparagraph (g) — "Discrimination in classification." This could be a reprise of the comparable worth allegations or it could mean that in classifying jobs for pay purposes the responsible state officials had used the fraction of men in each job as a factor in deciding how high a wage to pay — which would be intentional discrimination.

Maybe the allegations in paragraph 9 are illuminated by subsequent paragraphs of the complaint. Paragraph 10, after summarizing the comparable worth study, says, "Defendants knew or should have known of the historical and continuing existence of patterns and practices of discrimination in compensation and classification, as documented at least in part by the State of Illinois Study." All that the study "documents," however, is that 28 percent of the [726] employees subject to the state's personnel code are employed in 24 job classifications, in each of which at least 80 percent of the employees are of the same sex, and that based on the principles of comparable worth the 12 predominantly female job classifications are underpaid by between 29 and 56 percent. For example, an electrician whose job is rated in the study at only 274 points in skill, responsibility, etc. has an average monthly salary of $2,826, compared to $2,104 for a nurse whose job is rated at 480 points. These disparities are consistent, however, with the state's paying market wages, and of course the fact that the state knew that market wages do not always comport with the principles of comparable worth would not make a refusal to abandon the market actionable under Title VII. But at the very end of paragraph 10 we read, "Moreover, defendants have knowingly and willfully failed to take any action to correct such discrimination" (emphasis added), and in the word "willfully" can perhaps be seen the glimmerings of another theory of violation that could survive a motion to dismiss. Suppose the state has declined to act on the results of the comparable worth study not because it prefers to pay (perhaps is forced by labor-market or fiscal constraints to pay) market wages but because it thinks men deserve to be paid more than women. Cf. Crawford v. Board of Education, 458 U.S. 527, 539 n. 21, 102 S.Ct. 3211, 3218 n. 21, 73 L.Ed.2d 948 (1982). This would be the kind of deliberate sex discrimination that Title VII forbids, once the statute is understood to allow wage disparities between dissimilar jobs to be challenged (Gunther).

"Willfully" is, however, a classic legal weasel word. Sometimes it means with wrongful intent but often it just means with knowledge of something or other. Willful evasion of taxes means not paying when you know you owe tax. After reading the comparable worth study the responsible state officials knew that the state's compensation system might not be consistent with the principles of comparable worth ("might" because there has been no determination that the comparable worth study is valid even on its own terms — maybe it's a lousy comparable worth study). But it would not follow that their failure to implement the study was willful in a sense relevant to liability under Title VII. They may have decided not to implement it because implementation would cost too much or lead to excess demand for some jobs and insufficient demand for others. The only thing that would make the failure a form of intentional and therefore actionable sex discrimination would be if the motivation for not implementing the study was the sex of the employees — if for example the officials thought that men ought to be paid more than women even if there is no difference in skill or effort or in the conditions of work.

Paragraphs 11 through 31 of the complaint present the specific claims of each of the 21 named individual plaintiffs. In materially identical language each paragraph complains that the wage rate in the plaintiff's "job classification is discriminatorily depressed because it is historically female-dominated and because of defendants' continuing use of a sex-biased system of pay and classification," and that the "Defendants continue to pay discriminatorily low wages to plaintiff [name] because she [in one case he] works in a historically female-dominated job classification." Standing alone these allegations would appear to state merely a comparable worth claim. But they do not stand alone. In light of paragraphs 9 and 10, each of paragraphs 12 through 31 may conceivably (if somewhat improbably) be intended merely to identify each of the named plaintiffs as a victim of the discriminations alleged in the earlier paragraphs.

We have said that a plaintiff can plead himself right out of court. But the court is not to pounce on the plaintiff and by a crabbed and literal reading of the complaint strain to find that he has pleaded facts which show that his claim is not actionable, and then dismiss the complaint on the merits so that the plaintiff cannot replead. (The dismissal would preclude another suit based on any theory that the [727] plaintiff could have advanced on the basis of the facts giving rise to the first suit. Alexander v. Chicago Park District, 773 F.2d 850, 854 (7th Cir.1985); Bunker Ramo Corp. v. United Business Forms, Inc., 713 F.2d 1272, 1277 (7th Cir.1983).) The district judge did not quite do that here, because this complaint can easily be read to allege a departure from the principles of comparable worth, and no more. But that reading is not inevitable, and the fact that it is logical and unstrained is not enough to warrant dismissal. In the system created by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 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." Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 45-46, 78 S.Ct. 99, 102, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957). This language, repeated though it has been in countless later cases (see, e.g., Hishon v. King & Spaulding, 467 U.S. 69, 104 S.Ct. 2229, 2233, 81 L.Ed.2d 59 (1984)), should not be taken literally; for taken literally it would permit dismissal only in frivolous cases. As we said earlier, if the plaintiff, though not required to do so, pleads facts, and the facts show that he is entitled to no relief, the complaint should be dismissed. There would be no point in allowing such a lawsuit to go any further; its doom is foretold. But this is not such a case. Although the complaint tries to make too much out of a comparable worth study that, standing alone, cannot provide a basis for a claim under Title VII — although the complaint appears to include the theory of violation that the Ninth Circuit later and rightly rejected — a complaint cannot be dismissed merely because one of the theories on which it proceeds, and the facts alleged in support of that theory, do not make out a claim for relief. A complaint that alleges intentional sex discrimination, which Gunther makes actionable even though the discrimination is between different job classifications rather than within the same classification, cannot be dismissed just because one of the practices, indeed the principal practice, instanced as intentional sex discrimination — the employer's failure to implement comparable worth — is lawful.

Furthermore, a complaint is not required to allege all, or any, of the facts logically entailed by the claim. If Illinois is overpaying men relative to women, this must mean — unless the market model is entirely inapplicable to labor markets — that it is paying women at least their market wage (and therefore men more), for women wouldn't work for less than they could get in the market; and if so the state must also be refusing to hire women in the men's jobs, for above-market wages in those jobs would be a magnet drawing the women from their lower-paying jobs. Maybe the references in the complaint to the segregation of jobs by sex are meant to allege such refusals but if not this pleading omission would not be critical. A plaintiff does not have to plead evidence. If these plaintiffs admitted or the defendants proved that there was no steering or other method of segregating jobs by sex, the plaintiffs' theory of discrimination might be incoherent, and fail. But a complaint does not fail to state a claim merely because it does not set forth a complete and convincing picture of the alleged wrongdoing. So the plaintiffs do not have to allege steering even if it is in some sense implicit in their claim.

Before concluding that the district court should not have dismissed the complaint we must consider whether anything happened between the filing of the complaint and the district court's decision to show that the plaintiffs really were pleading just a comparable worth case. The first thing that happened was that the state filed its motion to dismiss or in the alternative for summary judgment. Attached to the motion were two affidavits, one from a state official attesting that the Illinois Nurses' Association had not pressed for comparable worth in collective bargaining negotiations involving some of the job classifications to which the named plaintiffs belong, the other from an economist attacking the concept of comparable worth. In response the plaintiffs argued that their case was not a comparable worth case but an intentional [728] discrimination case. This response is less decisive on the meaning of the complaint than our summary might suggest. The plaintiffs seem to understand by a comparable worth case one in which the only evidence of discrimination is that wages depart from the principle of comparable worth to the prejudice (mostly) of female employees. They seem to think — wrongly in our view — that the state's refusal to accept the recommendations of a comparable worth study that a state agency had commissioned takes the case out of the category of comparable worth and puts it into that of intentional discrimination.

But there was more to the plaintiffs' memorandum in opposition. Several pages were devoted to arguing that there was additional evidence of discrimination besides the results of the comparable worth study and the refusal to take corrective measures in accordance with the study. If these pages had been submitted in the form of a motion to amend the complaint, then, even though the judge's leave to amend would have been required (the plaintiffs had amended the complaint once, and that was the only amendment they were permitted to make without the judge's permission or the written consent of the defendants), he would have had to grant it. Leave to amend the complaint "shall be freely given when justice so requires," Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(a), and there could have been no prejudice to the defendants here, when the motion would have come so soon after the filing of the original complaint and before discovery had begun.

The plaintiffs attached to their memorandum more than 200 pages of exhibits. Much of this documentation is devoted to showing that the fraction of women varies across jobs and that the higher the fraction the lower the wage, and thus duplicates the comparable worth study. But some of it is relevant to showing deliberate discrimination. Some of it indicates or asserts that women are not classified in accordance with the work they actually do and as a result are paid less than the state's own rules entitle them to; that appointing "hand picked" successors when jobs become vacant and disseminating news of job openings by word of mouth rather than by public notice prevent women from competing for the higher-paid, predominantly male jobs; that women have been excluded from some job categories altogether, even though they are capable of performing the jobs; that predominantly female jobs have sometimes been abolished when layoffs were necessary, in order to spare men from being laid off; and that sometimes the same jobs have been given two classifications (e.g., Prison Clerk and Clerk Typist), one for men and one for women, with the former being paid more even though the work is identical. Much of this "evidence" would not be admissible at trial; some is outside the statute of limitations (and hence "merely an unfortunate event in history which has no present legal consequences," United Air Lines, Inc. v. Evans, 431 U.S. 553, 558, 97 S.Ct. 1885, 1889, 52 L.Ed.2d 571 (1977)); some is from before 1972, when Title VII was made applicable to state employees — and there is no legal duty to undo the effects of previous discrimination (see Hazelwood School District v. United States, 433 U.S. 299, 309, 97 S.Ct. 2736, 2742, 53 L.Ed.2d 768 (1977)). But we are not at the moment interested in whether the plaintiffs have produced any evidence of unlawful discrimination. That is the issue with regard to the propriety of summary judgment. The present issue is whether, even though the judge could not properly dismiss the complaint because it did not state a claim on its face, the plaintiffs may have put themselves out of court by their subsequent filing — a filing that might be compared to a response to a motion for a more definite statement under Rule 12(e) — which showed that the complaint was narrower than it might have seemed. Our answer is "no." The exhibits, treated not as evidence but as an elaboration of the complaint (as in a Rule 12(e) filing), confirm, what the language of the complaint suggests, that the complaint charges intentional discrimination of the sort made actionable by the Gunther case, as well as a mere failure to [729] pay comparable wages for comparable work. Compare Orthmann v. Apple River Campground, Inc., supra, 757 F.2d at 914-15. It should not have been dismissed under Rule 12(b)(6).

The next question is whether the dismissal can be upheld on the alternative ground urged by the state, that its motion for summary judgment should have been granted. Although we are reluctant, without having the benefit of the district court's view on the matter, to uphold the dismissal of a complaint on the ground that the defendant was entitled to summary judgment, Martinez v. United Automobile Workers, Local No. 1373, 772 F.2d 348, 353 (7th Cir.1985), we would do so if it were quite clear that the plaintiff had failed to raise a genuine issue of material fact on an essential element of its claim. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(c); Hooks v. Hooks, 771 F.2d 935, 945 (6th Cir.1985); Experimental Engineering, Inc. v. United Technologies Corp., 614 F.2d 1244, 1247 (9th Cir.1980); cf. Jewel Cos. v. Pay Less Drug Stores Northwest, Inc., 741 F.2d 1555, 1564-65 (9th Cir.1984). The fact that discovery is not complete — indeed, has not begun — need not defeat the motion. A defendant may move for summary judgment at any time. Rule 56(b). If the plaintiff has not had time to do enough discovery to respond to the motion, his proper course is to ask for a postponement of the hearing on the motion. See, e.g., United States v. Light, 766 F.2d 394, 397-98 (8th Cir.1985).

Since the plaintiffs made no request for additional time, the defendants are entitled to summary judgment if as the record now stands the plaintiffs have failed to raise a genuine issue of fact regarding intentional discrimination. See, e.g., Powers v. Dole, 782 F.2d 689, 696-97 (7th Cir.1986); Bryson v. Royal Business Group, 763 F.2d 491, 495 (1st Cir.1985); Over the Road Drivers, Inc. v. Transport Ins. Co., 637 F.2d 816, 820-21 (1st Cir.1980); Brown v. Chaffee, 612 F.2d 497, 504-05 (10th Cir.1979). That might well be the situation had the defendants submitted affidavits or other evidence denying that they had engaged in intentional sex discrimination, but they did not. Their affidavits, being directed exclusively to the comparable worth theory of the complaint — being designed to show that the theory was not sound, either in general or in the circumstances of this case — did not address any other form of discrimination. This doesn't mean that the state was asleep at the switch; for when the state filed its motion it was not clear that the plaintiffs were seeking to press any other theory of discrimination besides comparable worth. Anyway, motions for partial summary judgment are permitted. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(a), (b). Nor will there by anything to prevent the state from filing a further motion for summary judgment supported by sworn denials of any intentional discrimination within the scope of the complaint. Lindsey v. Dayton-Hudson Corp., 592 F.2d 1118, 1121 (10th Cir.1979); Weit v. Continental Illinois Nat'l Bank & Trust Co., 478 F.Supp. 285, 292 n. 4 (N.D.Ill.1979), aff'd, 641 F.2d 457 (7th Cir.1981); Jones v. Wike, 654 F.2d 1129 (5th Cir.1981) (per curiam). But normally a motion for summary judgment unsupported by affidavits or materials of equivalent evidentiary standing that negate an essential element of the plaintiff's case cannot be granted with the effect of dismissing the entire complaint. Backes v. Valspar Corp., 783 F.2d 77, 79 (7th Cir.1986).

There is a conflict between the circuits over the question whether a defendant can ever get summary judgment without submitting evidence. Compare Catrett v. Johns-Manville Sales Corp., 756 F.2d 181 (D.C.Cir.), cert. granted under the name of Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, ___ U.S. ___, 106 S.Ct. 342, 88 L.Ed.2d 285 (1985), with Fontenot v. Upjohn Co., 780 F.2d 1190 (5th Cir.1986). We agree with Judge Bork, dissenting in Catrett, and with Judge Rubin, who wrote the opinion in Fontenot, that if the plaintiff fails to obtain admissible evidence with regard to an essential issue that the plaintiff has the burden of proving, the defendant can obtain summary [730] judgment without putting in his own evidence. For it is clear in such a case that the plaintiff can't win at trial, and the purpose of summary judgment is to head off trials the outcome of which is foreordained. In Catrett the plaintiff had had two years to conduct discovery and had come up with no admissible evidence on an essential element of her claim. The plaintiffs in this case conducted no discovery. Granted, a plaintiff cannot stave off summary judgment just by sitting on its hands for months and years, reluctant to begin discovery proceedings unlikely to produce any admissible evidence of the defendant's liability. That was Fontenot, where the plaintiff's answers to the defendant's interrogatories — answers filed ten months after the suit had been filed — revealed that she had no factual evidence to support her claim. Later filings reinforced this impression. This case is different. The defendants did not attempt to smoke out the evidentiary basis if any for the full range of claims in the complaint. The defendants' motion to dismiss or alternatively for summary judgment seemed to have a dual purpose: to show that all that the plaintiffs were trying to prove was a comparable worth case and to establish the factual and legal inadequacy of such a case. The exhibits that the plaintiffs attached to their memorandum in opposition to the motion also had a dual purpose — to defend the comparable worth aspect of the complaint and (if this tack failed) to show that there was more to the complaint than comparable worth. They failed in their first purpose but succeeded in their second.

The state asks us, finally, to uphold dismissal on the ground that the difficulties of remedying wage discrimination between different jobs are insuperable. It points out that the district court would have to decide what the wages in the different jobs would have been but for discrimination in order to know how much backpay to award. But if difficulties of remedy, unless completely insurmountable, were a proper reason for throwing out a complaint at the pleading stage, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954), would have been decided in favor of allowing public schools to continue to segregate the races. Even if, as the state argues, a court could not reasonably impose comparable worth on an employer even as a remedy for blatant discrimination, except in a case such as Gunther (or indeed AFSCME, had the plaintiffs there prevailed) where the employer has in some sense approved a plan for comparable worth, this would just mean that some other, though perhaps less effective, remedy would have to be substituted. Maybe the plaintiffs would have to be content with an injunction that would knock down any barriers to women's being hired in the traditionally men's jobs, thus allowing the market to eliminate any sex-linked wage differential not justified by a difference in demand and supply, as women gravitated into the higher-paying men's jobs. It is premature to conclude that there is no worthwhile remedy for the intentional discrimination that consists of overpaying workers in predominantly male jobs because most of those workers are male. We emphasize, however, that proof of this causality is essential and is not to be inferred merely from the results of a comparable worth study and from the refusal of the employer to implement the study's recommendations. We do not want to arouse false hopes; the plaintiffs have a tough row to hoe. They may lose eventually on summary judgment if discovery yields no more evidence than is contained in the unsupported assertions and stale and seemingly isolated incidents in the plaintiffs' exhibits. But the plaintiffs are entitled to make additional efforts to prove a case of intentional discrimination within the boundaries sketched in this opinion.

REVERSED AND REMANDED.