Over a quarter of civil litigants file suit in federal court without an attorney.  Most unrepresented litigants are in prison, and many of their cases raise complex, delicate constitutional questions.  The number of unrepresented litigants in federal courts rose steadily until the 1990s, when Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) of 1995 to limit the burden of frivolous inmate litigation on federal courts.  Since 1996, the PLRA has defined courts’ procedural obligations for inmate and in forma pauperis (IFP) suits, often filed pro se.  The PLRA requires that courts screen and dismiss sua sponte cases that are frivolous, malicious, or fail to state a claim.  Congress did not define these terms.

The U.S. Supreme Court has given this last standard, failure to state a claim, a different meaning since Congress passed the PLRA.  The Court evolved pleading doctrine from Conley v. Gibson’s notice pleading to Bell Atlantic Corporation v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal’s plausibility pleading.  Although pleading doctrine has changed, the Court has consistently required that lower courts liberally construe pro se pleadings.  The Court has neither defined the failure to state a claim under the PLRA, nor defined liberal construction.

Missing definitions and vague guidance converge at the PLRA’s screening stage.  While most circuit courts appear to give simple “lip service” to liberal construction and apply a standard plausibility analysis, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit appears to take a more liberal approach to screening.  This Note explores the varying approaches that courts have taken when liberally construing pro se complaints.  It advocates for applying Erickson v. Pardus’s pleading standard to screening dismissals under the PLRA and applying the Second Circuit’s approach to liberal construction.