XII. Rule 11 – Sanctions – Introduction

A. Recall the example in Haddle.  The plaintiff’s problem, at least in the district court’s view, was that he had an at will job which wasn’t damage to his property within the meaning of the statute.  The court dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted but gave the plaintiff leave to amend to cure this defect.  Why didn’t the Haddle plaintiff just amend his complaint and allege that he had a for-cause job, leaving it to the discovery process to expose that as untrue?  That would have defeated the defendant’s motion to dismiss and allowed the case to proceed to discovery and thus upped the settlement value of the case immeasurably.

 B. Plaintiff cannot allege something that’s not true in his complaint or in his answer because of Rule 11.  How does Rule 11 work?