The 'Twiqbal' Puzzle and Empirical Study of Civil Procedure

This essay, written for a Stanford Law Review issue exploring “The Empirical Revolution in Law,” offers a critical assessment of the large body of empirical scholarship examining the effect of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal on judicial and litigant behavior and then uses the critique to make some broader observations about the past, present, and future of empirical study of civil procedure.