Beyond Probability: Plausibility as Coherence in Asymmetric Litigation

Federal pleading doctrine systematically misallocates epistemic risk. When courts credit defendants’ “obvious alternative explanations” at the pleading stage, they require plaintiffs to negate defendant-controlled narratives before discovery begins—imposing the burden of factual uncertainty on the party least able to bear it. What Twombly and Iqbal designed as a threshold screen for incoherent claims has been transformed, in practice, into a mechanism for resolving contested factual questions at the moment of greatest informational asymmetry.