Of the five amendments grouped under Criminal Rights, this is the outlier — it doesn’t govern criminal trials at all. It preserves the right to a jury in federal civil lawsuits, and it’s genuinely one of the least litigated provisions in the entire Bill of Rights.
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
The text
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.
Spelling and punctuation as transcribed by the National Archives.
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.
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. It also includes a Re-examination Clause, limiting how much a judge can second-guess a jury’s factual findings after the verdict.
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, part of why appellate courts generally defer heavily to jury fact-finding rather than revisiting it from scratch.
