Seventh Amendment

The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in federal civil cases — private lawsuits over money or property, as distinct from criminal prosecutions. Where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars, it provides, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury may be reexamined except under the rules of the common law. It is one of the few constitutional provisions still pegged to a dollar figure from the eighteenth century.

The amendment reflected deep colonial faith in juries as a bulwark against both government and powerful private interests. English authorities had steered colonial disputes into admiralty and equity courts that sat without juries, and Americans came to see the civil jury as a democratic check — a way for ordinary citizens, not just judges, to decide who was in the right. Anti-Federalists made the absence of a civil-jury guarantee one of their loudest objections to the original Constitution.

Unlike most of the Bill of Rights, the Seventh Amendment has never been incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, so it binds only the federal courts; states set their own rules for civil juries. Its twenty-dollar threshold has never been raised, a small monument to constitutional text frozen in place. Still, it preserves in federal litigation the old principle that a jury of one's peers, and not a judge alone, may be the final word on the facts of a dispute.