The Seventh Amendment and the Supreme Court

Apologies to all for having wandered into some other minefields amidst this series on the Bill of Rights.  Needless to say, there is always something outrageous or idiotic enough to trump a simple musing on the Constitution, as far as a daily topic.  If it isn't Obama babbling on Comedy Central about the IRS, he's off giving taxpayer money to Kenya that's actually going to get borrowed from China because the taxpayers money was already blown.

The Seventh Amendment doesn't get a lot of air time, because -- heck, who even knows what it means from its text?  That text is a bit dense in places and the translation to conversational English seems a bit discontinuous from the original.

Here it is:

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.

The first part is pretty easy -- if you are defending a civil suit in federal court, you are entitled to a jury to hear the case (as long as the matter at hand is at least $20).  I am going to save you the research; according to the Consumer Price Index, the equivalent amount today would be about $520, still small enough that such a dispute would be settled in small claims and not in front of the Federal bench.

It is the second half of it that is of more interest.  If I am reading the various interpretations of the oddly written text correctly, it is saying that, again in the context of a civil trial before a jury in a Federal court, whatever a jury finds -- not the verdict, but the facts of the case -- is golden and cannot be reversed or even looked at in a higher court. 

Now, I think that's interesting as heck, if only because I didn't know that to be true.  After all, the most contentious case to get to the Supreme Court involving the Seventh Amendment was Colgrove v. Battin about 40 years ago, and that one was only about how many jurymen it took to screw in a light ... oops, sorry -- how many jurymen were needed to comply with the Amendment's provision requiring the court to offer a jury trial.

The answer, by the way, was "six."  I don't know how they decided that six was a magic number, and why seven would work but five would not.  Those are magical and mystical people that sit on the Supreme Court, even the ones there in 1973.

But I digress.

As I said, I was startled in that I did not know that what a jury says to be a finding of fact -- the "facts of the case" -- is obliged to be held as true in any appeal of the verdict in a Federal civil suit.  An appeal may result in a determination of errors by the court in the lower court's rulings, but it cannot reverse what the lower jury determined to be the outcome of the review of evidence and testimony.

Here's the perfect example.  Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, is about to ... eventually going to ... well, he has to rule sometime on appeal of the Tom Brady case, involving deflated footballs.  We know from the investigation that Goodell's investigators found no evidence that Brady ever asked for footballs to be deflated below the 12.5 PSI minimum.

So if Goodell does not drop the suspension, and Brady is not completely exonerated, he will take a case to Federal court (the NFL is interstate commerce).  The jury will see that Brady was punished inappropriately and will, at the very least, find that Brady did not conspire to set football inflation outside the league rules.

That finding is what would stop Goodell from appealing, because the jury's determination of no specific intent to violate the league rules could not then be challenged in a higher court.  Bingo, back on the field, possibly with a second "back atcha" suit against the NFL, at which that finding would be a very strong part.

We know now -- OK, I think I understand this to be the case -- that the insertion of that clause was actually to reflect a desire by the Framers to keep the Supreme Court from doing the job of the lower court(s) and keep them focused on looking at applicable law (vice looking at the facts of a case).  Soon enough, the judicial principle would arise under which the Supreme Court would rule on questions of constitutionality, but either way the Framers wanted their high judicial noses out of the role of finding fact.

The purpose of this series has been to look at what kind of responsibilities fall on us as a society or individuals, and what kind of complications can arise as a result of a free society having the Bill of Rights as part of its founding document.  And I think this one is probably a bit cryptic, since it is actually saying what the courts can and cannot do.

But I like to think that the obligation of this Amendment falls, in fact, on the citizenry as we serve as members of the juries of these cases.  I've been, as I mentioned, on juries before and, while I am certain we took our awesome responsibility extremely seriously, it was not because anyone told us that whatever we found to be factual was cast in stone thereafter.

It was because we had an innate, American belief in our role in the free society, and that jury service was indeed an awesome responsibility.

And that's a fact.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
 Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu.