The Civil Litigator
| Publication year | 1980 |
| Pages | 705 |
| Citation | Vol. 9 No. 4 Pg. 705 |
1980, April, Pg. 705. The Civil Litigator
The Seventh Amendment provides that "in suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. . . ." In 1791, when the amendment was adopted, two distinct forums existed for litigating claims: courts of law, which utilized juries, and courts of equity, which did not. Since the Seventh Amendment speaks in terms of "preserving" the jury right, the distinction between law and equity, and the resulting determination of whether a jury trial is available, it has traditionally been based on the historical categorization of the actions as of 1791.(fn1)
In 1938 the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure merged the previously "separate" court systems into a single system of federal courts. Although the Rules were not intended to affect the jury-trial right,(fn2) the liberal, and in some cases mandatory, joinder and counterclaim provisions often resulted in mixed legal and equitable claims in a single action. When this situation occurred, the court was presented with the problem of deciding whether the equitable, non-jury or the legal, jury claims were to be decided first. Since the doctrines of res judicata and collateral estoppel preclude relitigating issues, the court's determination on the order of trial had a great practical significance with respect to the ultimate right to a jury trial.
This question reached the Supreme Court in two cases: Beacon Theatres, Inc. v. West-over(fn3) and Dairy Queen, Inc. v. Wood.(fn4) Taken as a whole, the Beacon Theatres and Dairy Queen cases and their progeny expanded the jury trial right.(fn5) They moved Seventh Amendment jurisprudence away from a historical classification and held that courts must look to the nature of each underlying issue rather than the form of pleadings or the choice of words. The right to trial by jury attaches to any legal issue and, to the extent that issue is common to equitable claims, the jury's determination will also be binding on the subsequent resolution of those equitable claims.
While the basic thrust of the modern Seventh Amendment cases is toward an expanded use of juries in civil litigation, there does exist in them language which can serve as a basis for limiting the jury right in certain cases. In Dairy Queen, the court said:
[I]n order to maintain. . . a suit [in equity] on a cause of action cognizable at law, . . . the plaintiff must be able to show that the "accounts between the parties" are of such a "complicated nature" that only a court of equity can satisfactorily unravel them.(fn6)
Earlier, in Kirby v. Lake Shore & M.S.R.R., the court said:
The case made by the plaintiff is clearly
one of which a court of equity may take cognizance. The complicated nature of the accounts between the parties constitutes a sufficient ground for going into equity.(fn7)
These cases, however, have a limited use because only the plaintiff has the ability to invoke equitable jurisdiction and because equitable jurisdiction and resulting trial to the court in the "accounting" cases is premised on the inadequacy of the remedy, i.e., where the complexity lies in assessing damages rather than liability.(fn8)
The notion that the complexity of a case may alone be sufficient grounds for bringing it into equity received renewed interest following the 1970 opinion in Ross v. Bernhard where, in a footnote, the United States Supreme Court said: "As our cases indicated, the...
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