Opinion ID: 437142
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Statement of Constitutional Claim

Text: 18 It is a well accepted principle 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 that would entitle him to relief. Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 45, 78 S.Ct. 99, 102, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957). Here, the complaint alleged that after declaring a state of financial emergency, the Board of Trustees terminated the contracts of eighty-eight employees without regard to any uniform policy. It is true that the complaint does not specifically state that elimination of certain employees and not others without reference to a uniform policy evidences arbitrary and capricious decisionmaking in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor does the complaint specifically allege that the termination of some employees and not others without regard to any policy necessarily evidences racial motivation. 19 Despite plaintiffs' failure to elaborate, however, it is clear that they are claiming deprivation of substantive due process based on the fact that their contracts were terminated while the contracts of other employees were maintained, all in absence of any rational plan to explain this action. This is all that is required. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a complaint is not an anagramatic exercise in which the pleader must find just exactly the prescribed combination of words and phrases. Thompson v. Allstate Insurance Company, 476 F.2d 746, 749 (5th Cir.1973). Plaintiffs simply must give  'a short and plain statement of the claim' that will give the defendant fair notice of what the plaintiff's claim is and the grounds upon which it rests. Conley v. Gibson, supra, 355 U.S. at 47, 78 S.Ct. at 103. Since such notice was afforded, dismissal on this ground was improper.