by Eric Wood
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The Sixth Amendment guarantees a jury in criminal cases. The Seventh does the same for civil cases - lawsuits between private parties over money or property, not government prosecutions - above a fairly low dollar threshold set in 1791 and never adjusted since.
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.
Seventh Amendment, U.S. Constitution
A right that mostly applies to federal court
Unlike most of the Bill of Rights, the Seventh Amendment has never been incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. States are free to set their own rules for civil jury trials, and most do guarantee something similar through their own state constitutions, but the Seventh Amendment’s specific text only binds federal courts directly.
The “twenty dollars” threshold, written when that sum represented real money, has never been updated by amendment and is effectively meaningless today - nearly any federal civil case clears it without difficulty, so in practice the threshold doesn’t function as a meaningful limit on when the right applies.
Worth knowing
The amendment specifically preserves the right to trial by jury as it existed under English common law in 1791 - it doesn’t extend to types of legal claims that didn’t traditionally involve juries under that older common-law system, like most claims in equity (injunctions, for example) as opposed to claims for money damages.
Why it still matters
Every major federal civil case that goes to trial rather than settling - product liability suits, employment discrimination claims, patent disputes - implicates the right this amendment protects. The Re-examination Clause is also a real, active constraint: it limits how much a judge can second-guess a jury’s factual findings after the verdict, which is part of why appellate courts generally defer heavily to jury fact-finding rather than revisiting it from scratch.
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