Editor’s note: This is part of a series exploring the Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and how they have shaped and changed our country.
A large public building often has a sense of scale about it — something that can be elevated by a grand twin staircase.
Are two banks of steps arriving at the same place necessary? Perhaps not. But they do illustrate a point. There is more than one way — and more than one reason — to achieve the same end.
The same can be said of the Seventh Amendment.
“In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”
Much of the Bill of Rights reads like a series of corrections. The early amendments reflect lessons learned under British rule — protections against quartering soldiers, unreasonable searches, compelled confessions and abuses of governmental power.
The Seventh Amendment feels different.
Rather than replacing something broken, it preserves something the framers believed already worked. The right to a civil jury trial was not a new construction for the new nation. It was something carried forward.
That is one reason the Seventh Amendment deserves to stand on its own rather than simply being viewed as a companion to the Sixth Amendment right to a jury in criminal prosecutions.
The Sixth and Seventh Amendments are like those twin staircases. They rise through the same courthouse toward the same end — justice — but they do so for different reasons.
Where the Sixth Amendment protects citizens from the immense power of the government, the Seventh preserves the role of ordinary citizens in resolving disputes between one another.
That civil side of justice often receives less attention. Americans tend to think of courts through criminal cases because those carry the dramatic stakes of imprisonment or even death. Civil liability can seem somehow less serious because no one leaves in handcuffs.
But civil judgments still can be ruinous.
Duquesne University law professor Lauren Galey recently asked an audience whether they would rather spend 30 days in jail or face a $5 million civil judgment. Every person chose jail.
“Wages can be garnished, property can be liened, it can be terrible for your credit,” Galey said. “Some of the judgments aren’t even dischargeable in bankruptcy.”
The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases involving money damages. In practice, however, those jury trials have become increasingly rare as arbitration takes their place.
Galey noted less than 1% of federal civil cases ultimately go before juries. Many are settled. Others are diverted into arbitration agreements embedded in contracts. Some become too expensive to pursue through trial at all.
You do not have to exercise a right for it to exist.
That makes the wording of the amendment especially important. The Seventh Amendment says the right to a jury trial “shall be preserved.”
Not created. Preserved.
The framers believed ordinary citizens should continue to have a direct role in deciding questions of harm, responsibility and fairness. That civic participation had long been part of English and colonial courts and was viewed as important enough to carry into the new constitutional structure.
Despite penning the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson still saw some things worth carrying over from the old country. He believed strongly in the need for juries, calling them “the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.”
For James Madison, the use of juries was “a right resulting from the social compact which regulates the action of the community.”
The amendment even reinforces the seriousness of the jury’s role by limiting how factual findings can later be re-examined by courts.
“Judges take care of the law, and juries take care of the facts,” Galey said.
That division remains an important part of the architecture of American justice.
And like those twin staircases, both paths matter — not because they are identical, but because they help support the same institution from different directions.