Opinion ID: 716743
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: elliott v. perez and the heightened pleading requirement

Text: 19 Before turning to the sufficiency of Doe's complaint, we must determine whether any statements therein should be excluded as conclusionary. The School Officials assert that Doe's complaint is a paragon of poetic license and fails to satisfy the heightened pleading requirement of Elliott v. Perez. 23 We disagree. 20 The School Officials speciously cherry pick paragraphs from Doe's complaint to quote to us, then assert that the whole complaint is conclusionary. When examined in isolation, the particular paragraphs selectively quoted by the School Officials do appear conclusionary; but when those quoted paragraphs are read in pari materiae with the factual allegations contained in the preceding dozen-plus paragraphs of Doe's complaint, it becomes obvious that the School Officials have self-servingly quoted only parts of the complaint. In short, the quoted paragraphs do not fairly represent the complaint as a whole. We conclude that when Doe's complaint is read in its entirety it is seen to plead Jane's claims with more than enough particularity to meet the requirements set forth in Elliott. 21