Seventh Amendment

• Author: Dennis J. Mahoney
• Pages: 2388

Page 2388

An unexpectedly controversial provision of the document that emerged from the CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1787 was that giving the Supreme Court APPELLATE JURISDICTION "both as to law and fact." Anti-Federalists argued that the provision worked to abridge or deny the COMMON LAW right of TRIAL BY JURY in civil cases. Some, including PATRICK HENRY, went so far as to contend that it introduced the continental European civil law into the American court system. Although the convention had considered a clause protecting the right to a jury trial in civil cases, the clause was omitted; because the jury system varied somewhat from state to state, the meaning of the clause would not be certain. In the course of the RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION, five state conventions recommended an amendment to give the right explicit constitutional status.

The Seventh Amendment was proposed by Congress in 1789 and was ratified in 1791, as part of the BILL OF RIGHTS. As originally introduced by JAMES MADISON, the restriction on review of a jury's findings would have been inserted in Article III immediately after the definition of the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction. When the Bill of Rights was reorganized into a series of new articles, the restriction was joined to the general guarantee of a jury trial in federal civil cases.

The purpose of the amendment was not to extend the right to a jury trial but to preserve it as it then existed. The phrase "common law" did not purport to exclude cases arising under federal statutes but rather those cognizable in EQUITY or under ADMIRALTY AND MARITIME JURISDICTION. The word "jury" originally meant the common law jury of twelve men; but the Supreme Court held in Colegrove v. Battin (1973) that a jury of six members satisfied the general intent of the amendment. The Seventh Amendment is one of the very few provisions of the Bill of Rights not made applicable to the states under the INCORPORATION DOCTRINE. State courts would thus be...