In the same case, however, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, the court also sent back the plaintiffs’ claims that they were held in abusive conditions of confinement following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. They’ll have another chance to make those claims, but, significantly, will have to meet the Supreme Court’s new heightened pleading standards set out in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal.

Congress has held two hearings already on the cases of Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, which introduced a new “credibility” requirement in pleading standards that civil rights advocates and some Democratic lawmakers complain leaves the fate of discrimination victims to the prejudices of a particular judge assigned to the case. Now, instead of simply having to state clearly what the claims are, plaintiffs have to convince the judge that those claims are credible at the outset, before even having had an opportunity to collect evidence to support them.

While that pleases some conservatives who view most civil rights lawsuits with skepticism, civil rights experts say it rewards employers and others who discriminate but have learned to cover their tracks.

As the Times puts it today: “The practical impact in, say, an employment discrimination case is to disadvantage the wronged employee, who is unlikely to have access at the outset to the records needed to prove wrongful conduct.”

The Times cites John Payton, president of the NAACP legal defense fund, who recently testified that some of the landmark cases of the civil rights era might never have survived the Supreme Court’s new standard. In his written testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, Payton cites specific examples of potentially meritorious cases that didn’t survive the new standard because the plaintiffs couldn’t convince a skeptical judge that employment, voting or housing discrimination is “credible.”

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former U.S. Attorney, put it at that Senate hearing, “In my experience, misconduct is inherently implausible” because we generally expect people to act decently, fairly and lawfully.

Nadler’s legislation acknowledges the fact that sometimes, they don’t live up to that standard.

That’s the question a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee examined Wednesday. Echoing a recent parallel hearing in the Senate, lawmakers and witnesses considered whether the Supreme Court’s recent rulings in two key cases undermined the ability of victims to have their day in court, or protected business and government from costly and intrusive lawsuits.

As in the Senate, House lawmakers appear divided along party lines. Democrats and their witnesses say that the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal have gutted the civil rights and antitrust laws and imposed an unfair and often insurmountable burden that will doom many valid claims. Republicans and their witnesses, meanwhile, say the court did the right thing to help reduce frivolous lawsuits that destroy small businesses and drag busy government officials into court unnecessarily.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who testified at Wednesday’s hearing, has introduced legislation to effectively turn back the clock to before the Supreme Court’s rulings by restoring the previous standard for filing claims.That legislation, HR 4115, the Open Access to Courts Act, was the focus of the hearing.

The key question is, should a victim filing a lawsuit be required to produce evidence of specific credible facts supporting her claims in order to be allowed to proceed with the case? In the past, courts have required only “a short and plain statement” of the claims. The facts are adduced in the course of the lawsuit through a legal process known as “discovery.”

For those who view most lawsuits as frivolous, the Supreme Court’s new standard is a welcome change. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) argued Wednesday that the high court’s recent requirement “seems to me to be very reasonable.” The proposed legislation, on the other hand, he argued, “is an economic stimulus package for trial lawyers.”

The Democrats’ witnesses, such as Eric Schnapper, law professor at University of Washington and a former attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, countered that the two recent Supreme Court cases “brought about sweeping changes in the lower courts, all for the worse.” In discrimination cases, now, so long as “discriminatory officials do a good job covering their tracks, under Iqbal and Twombly they can cut off any legal challenge before discovery is available to unearth their records or force them to answer questions under oath,” he said. The new standard “requires proof of a smoking gun,” which could doom many meritorious cases at the outset, he testified.

Gregory Katsas, a Justice Department official in the Bush administration who defended former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller in the Iqbal case and now defends corporations at a private law firm, warned that the proposed legislation would “open the floodgates” for “fishing expeditions – intrusive and expensive discovery into implausible and insubstantial claims.” That would “impose massive costs on defendants who have engaged in no wrongdoing.”

When it comes to cases against government officials, such as Iqbal — which alleged that senior Bush administration officials discriminated against Muslims by improperly detaining them after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — “such discovery would vitiate an important component of the officials’ qualified immunity” even where the claims are against individual government officials “for actions undertaken to prosecute wars abroad or to respond to national?security emergencies at home,” said Katsas. “Such a result,” he added, “would be paralyzing if not deadly.”

Both sides came armed with statistics to support their case that the recent Supreme Court decisions were either a “sea change” in the law that decimated the ability of civil rights claimants to pursue their cases, or were merely a logical interpretation of existing law and had little impact on the actual outcome of cases in court.

As several of the expert witnesses pointed out, however, the statistics don’t really tell you all that much. Even if cases are being filed or dismissed at about the same rate as before, there’s no telling how many cases haven’t been filed because the new standard would doom them, or how many defense lawyers are relying on the new standards to ask courts to dismiss cases that they wouldn’t have dared tried to get dismissed so early in the game before.

Supreme Court of the United States (WDCpix)

In denying the right of a Muslim Pakistani immigrant to sue former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller for his prolonged imprisonment and harsh treatment based on his religion and national origin, the Supreme Court on Monday raised the bar for plaintiffs seeking to sue high-level government officials for policies carried out by their subordinates.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Some in the media have reported that the decision revokes a detainee’s right to sue a public official for wrongful detention or mistreatment. In fact, the ruling was tailored narrowly, leaving the door open to such suits in the future. Yet it remains unclear how specific the plaintiff’s claims must be for a court to allow the case to proceed against high-level officials who condone unconstitutional practices.

In a sharply divided 5-4 opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority and joined by the conservative wing of the court, wrote that Javaid Iqbal had not set out sufficient specific facts to present a plausible case. Iqbal had claimed that after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks the Justice Department and FBI, led by Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI director Mueller, instituted a policy that resulted in the arrests and mistreatment of thousands of men based solely on their race, religion or national origin.

Iqbal claims that in November 2001, he was arrested at his Long Island home for using fraudulent identification documents. He was designated a person “of high interest,” however, purely because he is a Muslim from Pakistan, he says. Iqbal was held for almost six months in extremely restrictive conditions in a maximum security prison in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was segregated from the rest of the prison population and confined to a cell for 23 hours a day under a constant, blinding light. He claims that while there, his jailers “kicked him in the stomach, punched him in the face, and dragged him across” his cell without justification; “subjected him to serial strip and body-cavity searches when he posed no safety risk to himself or others,” and “and refused to let him and other Muslims pray because there would be ‘[n]o prayers for terrorists,’” according to the Supreme Court.

Although most of the mistreatment was allegedly committed by low-level guards and other officials at the prison, Iqbal claims that Ashcroft and Mueller were at the very least aware of the discriminatory detention and treatment and condoned it — or devised it — in violation of his First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Still, the court concluded that “the complaint does not show, or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU [the federal prison] due to their race, religion, or national origin. All it plausibly suggests is that the Nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”

Since filing his legal complaint, Iqbal’s lawyers say they’ve obtained much more evidence that Ashcroft and Mueller were actively involved in developing the policy that led to the discriminatory detention of Muslim immigrants, partly because they were allowed to proceed with the case against the lower level federal defendants. In addition, three reports from the Office of Inspector General issued in 2003 confirm many of the charges that after Sept. 11, pursuant to federal policies, Muslim immigrants were rounded up and detained for prolonged periods without justification in harsh conditions, denied access to lawyers, and physically and verbally abused. But Iqbal and his lawyers didn’t know the exact role of high-level Justice Department and FBI officials when they filed the case.

In fact, plaintiffs usually don’t have all the evidence when they file a case; the evidence is usually produced in the course of the litigation. “Rarely will you know the inner workings of what happened, especially where the government is trying to keep things secret, such as after 9-11,” said Alex Reinhardt, a lawyer representing Iqbal in his case and now a professor at Cardozo Law School. “If the decision is over-read, it could have significant ramifications,” he said on Monday. “If courts require up front that you know your whole case before you file, it would be impossible to bring most cases.”

In a vigorous dissent, Justice David Souter, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, objected to the court’s imposition of these hurdles to government officials’ liability. In their view, the court’s opinion effectively “does away with supervisory liability,” because it implies that even if Ashcroft and Mueller knew that their subordinates were denying prisoners their constitutional rights and condoned it, they would not be legally responsible. The court does this, Souter wrote, even though Ashcroft and Mueller had conceded that “they could be held liable on a theory of knowledge and deliberate indifference. By overriding that concession, the Court denies Iqbal a fair chance to be heard on that question.”

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, warned on Monday that “there’s going to be a tendency to over-read the decision as creating an insurmountable barrier to these kinds of lawsuits. I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think the court’s suggesting you need to have detailed knowledge of what high-ranking officials were doing before you can have any discovery. This case turned in large part on the especially sparse allegations in the complaint,” he said, noting that much of the evidence supporting those allegations has since been produced. If they’d been cited in the case when it was filed, he said, “I think the court under its plausibility standard would have found it sufficient.”

Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing former prisoners making very similar claims in another case, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, said that because the district court allowed her case to move forward, “we have all of that information that shows high-level official involvement in the practices we’ve complained of.” But when lawyers first bring a case, she said, they’re usually not in that position. In cases involving victims of government abuse, then, the court’s decision “gives [government officials] a sort of practical immunity from suit because only they have the specific information about what actions they may have taken,” she said.

Souter’s dissent, interpreting the majority as eliminating supervisory liability, is “a broad reading of the case,” she said. “I hope it’s not interpreted as being that far-reaching. It’s never been the case that you can hold high-level officials accountable simply because their employees did something wrong, but if they’re deliberately indifferent to the fact that their subordinates are acting unconstitutionally, that may be the basis for liability. That basis is called into question by this decision.”

Although the Supreme Court remanded the case to the court of appeals, which could allow Iqbal to replead his case, the precedent set by the court’s decision will not be so easily undone.