Court Opinion

ID: 9445163
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:21:23.670313+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:08.934837
License: Public Domain

WOODBURY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The question here as I see it is not whether somewhere buried in the verbiage of the amended complaint there can be unearthed a statement of a cause of action. In my view the underlying question instead is whether the plaintiff’s “pleading,” which I understand to be her complaint, as finally amended, embodies a “short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief” as required by Rule 8(a) (2), F.R. C.P. This Rule states a basic and certainly a salutary principle of pleading. The court below gave plaintiff’s counsel fair warning of its intention to invoke the Rule, and with commendable patience it gave plaintiff’s counsel ample opportunity to conform his pleading to its requirement. Nevertheless, counsel for the plaintiff, instead of simplifying his complaint, flouted the District Court’s directions and piled Pelion upon Ossa by adding successive counts, eventually to the number of ten. This, in a simple tort case like the present, impresses me as in itself a violation of the Rule. That is to say, I do not interpret the Rule as requiring the District Court to subject the complaint to minute and painstaking scrutiny to see if somewhere lurking in *176its prolixity there may be found a statement of a claim entitling the plaintiff to relief. The Rule, as I read it, requires the plaintiff to state her claim with brevity and clarity; it does not require the court to edit it for her. Furthermore, even if the counts be considered separately, in no one of them can I discover the “short and plain statement” of a cause of action that the Rule requires. I think the District Court was abundantly justified in dismissing the plaintiff’s complaint and that in the interest of clarity and conciseness in pleading its action ought to be affirmed.