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.

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Doctrine below is drawn from raw/founder-constitution/tocs/amendVII.md (anchors only — 4 of 19 documents read).

Original public meaning. Virginia's Declaration of Rights, sec. 11 (12 June 1776), supplies the direct textual precursor: "in controversies respecting property, and in suits between man and man, the ancient trial by jury is preferable to any other, and ought to be held sacred" — civil jury trial framed as an ancient common-law inheritance, not a new invention, matching the Seventh Amendment's own backward-looking reference to "the rules of the common law."

The Amendment answers a specific ratification-era objection, not a free-floating principle: the original 1787 Constitution said nothing about jury trial in civil cases (Article III guaranteed it only for criminal trials), and Anti-Federalist writers made this silence a centerpiece of their opposition. The Federal Farmer, no. 4 (12 Oct. 1787), argues the civil jury is not merely a truth-finding mechanism but a structural check: "It is essential in every free country, that common people should have a part and share of influence, in the judicial as well as in the legislative department." Without it, the Federal Farmer warns, offices requiring "an expensive education" — including judgeships — "will be occupied by the few. The few, the well born, etc. as Mr. Adams calls them," are naturally disposed to favor "those of their own description." Trial "in the neighbourhood" of the parties matters too, the Federal Farmer argues, because oral testimony before local jurors is far more accessible to ordinary litigants than written evidence taken at a distance.

Alexander Hamilton's *Federalist* No. 83 (28 May 1788) is the direct Federalist rebuttal the Amendment eventually mooted. Hamilton does not deny the civil jury's value — he notes that friends and critics of the plan alike "concur... in the value they set upon the trial by jury," even as critics went further and called it "the very palladium of free government" — but denies that the Constitution's silence on civil juries amounts to their abolition: "Every man of discernment must at once perceive the wide difference between silence and abolition." He rejects the expressio unius argument (that specifying jury trial for criminal cases impliedly excluded it for civil ones) as resting on a maxim of interpretation misapplied to a constitution of government, and argues the true obstacle to a uniform constitutional civil-jury clause was practical: state civil-jury practice varied so much that "no words could be found for the uniform establishment of it" without either freezing bad state variations in place or overriding good ones.

Georgia v. Brailsford (1794), decided three years after ratification, shows the founding generation's own courts working with a civil jury right broader than fact-finding alone. Charging the jury in a case on the Court's original docket, Chief Justice Jay states the "good old rule" that juries decide fact and courts decide law, but immediately qualifies it: the jury has "a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy," though it should give the court's view of law due respect. See Georgia v. Brailsford.

Joseph Story's Commentaries (1833), §§ 1762-1766, record an early Supreme Court decision — arising from a Louisiana practice permitting motions for new trial that would re-examine a jury's factual findings — construing the Reexamination Clause's meaning of "common law" for the first time. The Court held the clause's use of "common law" tracks the same category Article III itself calls "law" — legal as opposed to equitable or admiralty rights and remedies — regardless of whether a particular state's own procedure historically used common-law forms:

"By common law they meant, what the constitution denominated in the third article 'law;' not merely suits, which the common law recognized among its old and settled proceedings, but suits, in which legal rights were to be ascertained and determined, in contradistinction to those, in which equitable rights alone were recognized, and equitable remedies were administered... In a just sense, the amendment then may well be construed to embrace all suits, which are not of equity and admiralty jurisdiction, whatever may be the peculiar form, which they may assume to settle legal rights." — quoted in Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 3:§ 1763 (1833)

The opinion also states the reexamination bar itself in terms the modern doctrine below still follows almost verbatim — that a jury-found fact may be revisited only by the common law's own methods, a new trial in the court where the case was tried or a correction of legal error on appeal, not a fresh factual inquiry by the reviewing court:

"No fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examinable, in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.' This is a prohibition to the courts of the United States to re-examine any facts tried by a jury in any other manner. The only modes, known to the common law, to re-examine such facts, are the granting of a new trial by the court, where the issue was tried... or the award of a venire facias de nove by an appellate court, for some error of law." — quoted in Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 3:§ 1764 (1833)

This extract does not name the parties to the decision it quotes; it is most likely Parsons v. Bedford, Breedlove & Robeson, 28 U.S. (3 Pet.) 433 (1830), but that citation was not independently confirmed within this ingest and should be verified before being cited as settled.

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These sources establish the ratification-era controversy the Seventh Amendment resolved and the founding generation's own (broader-than-modern) conception of the civil jury's law-deciding role. No founding-era source in this ingest explains why the $20 amount-in-controversy floor was set at that figure, nor does it explain why the Amendment has never been incorporated against the states — see Minneapolis & St. Louis R. Co. v. Bombolis (1916) and Curtis v. Loether (1974), cited but not read in full below.