The Seventh Amendment Guarantees a Civil Jury for Twenty Dollars and Means It

Twenty dollars. That is the figure written into the Bill of Rights, and it has never been adjusted for inflation, which makes it the only number in Washington that has not grown since 1791. The federal budget has grown. The Federal Register has grown. The tax code has grown to a length no living person has read. The Seventh Amendment still says twenty dollars.

It is easy to laugh at the number, and plenty of law professors do. But the number is the least important word in the amendment. What matters is the promise: when the government or anyone else hauls you into a civil suit of the kind tried at common law, a jury of your fellow citizens decides the facts. Not a judge appointed for life. Not an agency official who works for the same agency that is prosecuting you. Twelve neighbors, or at least six. In 2024 the Supreme Court reminded the federal bureaucracy that the promise still means what it says.

The text

The Seventh Amendment, ratified in 1791 with the rest of the Bill of Rights, reads:

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.

There are two clauses here, and each does a separate job.

1. The Preservation Clause. "In Suits at common law ... the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." The word is "preserved," not "created." The amendment protects a right Americans already had, the civil jury as it existed at common law, and forbids Congress and the federal courts to take it away.
2. The Re-examination Clause. "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." Once a jury has found the facts, a federal court may not simply substitute its own view. It may order a new trial or set aside a verdict only by the traditional common-law methods.

Notice also what the amendment does not say. It does not say "in all civil cases." It says "Suits at common law," a phrase with a specific meaning in 1791, which we will come to.

Why the Anti-Federalists demanded it

The original Constitution of 1787 guaranteed a jury only in criminal cases. Article III, Section 2 says: "The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury." On civil juries, it said nothing.

That silence became one of the loudest objections to ratification. In the Convention's final days, delegates raised the absence of a civil-jury guarantee, and the proposal to add one did not succeed. George Mason, who refused to sign, complained that the people were not secured even in the enjoyment of the benefit of the common law, as we describe in George Mason Refused to Sign, and His Objections Became the Bill of Rights. Anti-Federalist writers took up the cry. They warned that federal judges, sitting without juries, could decide debt suits, property disputes and suits by federal officers against citizens, and that the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction "both as to Law and Fact" could let a distant court overturn a local jury's findings.

The memory behind the fear was fresh. Parliament had expanded the jurisdiction of vice-admiralty courts, which sat without juries, to try colonists for violations of trade and revenue laws, including under the Stamp Act of 1765. The Declaration of Independence listed among the king's offenses: "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury." We read that list closely in The Grievance List in the Declaration Reads Like a Charge Sheet Against Power.

Hamilton answered in Federalist 83, and one early passage shows how much ground the two sides shared:

The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury; or if there is any difference between them it consists in this: the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government.

Hamilton argued that the civil jury varied so much among the states that no single federal rule could be written. The Anti-Federalists were not persuaded, and Madison included the civil-jury guarantee among the amendments he proposed to the First Congress in 1789.

What the twenty dollars means

So why twenty dollars? The threshold kept trivial disputes from requiring the expense of a jury, while making clear that any case of real consequence would have one. Twenty dollars in 1791 was not pocket change for most Americans, but it was well within the range of ordinary debts and disputes.

The figure has stood unchanged ever since, because amending the Constitution requires Article V, and no one has bothered. In practice it rarely matters in federal court. Most federal civil suits arise either under federal law or between citizens of different states, and Congress has set a much higher threshold, more than $75,000, for the second kind under 28 U.S.C. 1332. Federal cases worth twenty dollars are scarce.

One more point every family should know. The Supreme Court has never applied the Seventh Amendment to the states. In Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway Co. v. Bombolis (1916), it held that the amendment governs only federal courts. Your right to a civil jury in a state court comes from your state constitution, and nearly every state constitution protects it. We explain how other rights came to bind the states in How the Bill of Rights Came to Bind the States, One Right at a Time.

The historical test: what counted as a suit at common law

In 1791, English and American courts were divided into separate systems. Courts of common law tried suits for debts, damages, trespass and breach of contract, with juries. Courts of equity, like the English Court of Chancery, granted remedies such as injunctions and specific performance, without juries. Courts of admiralty handled maritime cases, also without juries.

The phrase "Suits at common law" points to the first category. Justice Joseph Story explained this in Parsons v. Bedford (1830): the amendment covers suits in which legal rights are to be determined, as opposed to suits in equity or admiralty.

Federal courts merged law and equity in 1938, and Congress has since created countless new causes of action that did not exist in 1791. So how does a court decide whether a modern claim gets a jury? The Supreme Court asks two questions.

1. Is the claim analogous to an action that would have been brought in a court of law in 1791, rather than in equity or admiralty?
2. More important, is the remedy sought legal or equitable? Money damages meant to punish or compensate are the classic legal remedy. An injunction is equitable.

Curtis v. Loether: new statutes, old rights

The modern rule took shape in Curtis v. Loether (1974). A Black woman sued a white landlord under the Fair Housing Act, alleging he had refused to rent to her because of her race, and sought damages. The defendants asked for a jury. The trial judge said no, because the claim was a new statutory one unknown to the common law.

A unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Thurgood Marshall, held that the defendants were entitled to a jury. The Seventh Amendment, Marshall wrote, applies to actions enforcing statutory rights if the statute creates legal rights and remedies enforceable in an action for damages in the ordinary courts of law. A damages action under the Fair Housing Act was much like a tort claim at common law. The right to a jury followed the remedy.

Note who won the right in that case: the defendants. The jury guarantee protects whoever is on the other side of the government's or the plaintiff's power. That is the point.

Thirteen years later, in Tull v. United States (1987), the Court held that a defendant facing civil penalties under the Clean Water Act was entitled to a jury on the question of liability, because civil penalties are a type of remedy that could only be enforced in courts of law. The judge could still set the amount.

The public rights exception and the agencies

Here is where the Seventh Amendment collides with the administrative state.

In Atlas Roofing Co. v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (1977), the Court upheld a scheme in which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration imposed civil penalties through an administrative commission, without a jury. The Court reasoned that when Congress creates new statutory "public rights" and assigns their enforcement to an administrative body, the Seventh Amendment does not require a jury.

Read broadly, that exception swallows the rule. If Congress can label any claim a "public right" and send it to an agency's in-house judges, then the civil jury exists only at the sufferance of the legislature, which is exactly what the word "preserved" was supposed to prevent. In Granfinanciera, S.A. v. Nordberg (1989), the Court began to narrow the exception, holding that a bankruptcy trustee's fraudulent-conveyance claim against a party who had not filed a claim against the estate was a private right, akin to a common-law action, and required a jury. The question of how far agencies could go remained open for decades. We trace the larger fight in The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 Was a Truce, and It Still Shows.

SEC v. Jarkesy: the promise kept

The question came to a head in SEC v. Jarkesy (2024).

George Jarkesy ran hedge funds. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with securities fraud. Under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the SEC had gained authority to seek civil penalties either in federal court, before a jury, or in its own in-house proceedings before an administrative law judge, without one. It chose its own forum. The agency's judge found Jarkesy liable, and the Commission imposed a civil penalty, among other sanctions.

The Supreme Court held, six to three, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, that the Seventh Amendment entitled Jarkesy to a jury. The reasoning followed the old test.

1. The remedy was legal. Civil penalties designed to punish and deter, rather than to restore the victim, are the kind of remedy only courts of law could impose.
2. The claim was a common-law cousin. Federal securities fraud was modeled on, and closely resembles, common-law fraud, which was tried to juries in 1791.
3. The public rights exception did not apply. The exception covers matters historically decided outside the courts, such as certain revenue, immigration and tariff questions. A fraud claim seeking penalties is a private-rights suit of the traditional common-law kind. Congress could not escape the jury by moving it to an agency.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurring, stressed that the jury right works alongside due process and Article III to keep the government from adjudicating private rights in its own house. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, warned that the ruling threatened the enforcement schemes of many agencies.

The dissent's warning is in fact a confession. If many agencies were imposing penalties for common-law-style wrongs without juries, then many agencies had been doing exactly what the Seventh Amendment forbids. The decision did not create a new right. It enforced an old one.

The strongest objection, and the answer

The objection. Juries are slow, expensive and unpredictable, especially in technical fields like securities, environmental and workplace safety law. Congress created expert agencies because lay jurors cannot follow complex financial or scientific evidence. Requiring juries for agency penalties will clog the courts, slow enforcement and let wrongdoers escape. The Seventh Amendment was written for disputes over horses and debts, not for derivatives.

The answer.

1. The Constitution chose the jury knowing it was inconvenient. Every argument for efficiency was available in 1791, and the people chose the jury anyway. Efficiency is a reason to fund the courts, not a reason to skip the jury.
2. Juries handle complex cases every day. Federal juries decide patent cases, antitrust suits, product liability claims and criminal securities fraud prosecutions. If a jury may send a defendant to prison for securities fraud, a jury may decide whether he owes a civil penalty for it.
3. The agency as prosecutor and judge is the real problem. In an in-house proceeding, the agency writes the rule, investigates, charges, and decides through its own employees, then hears the appeal itself. Montesquieu and Madison called that concentration of powers the very definition of tyranny. A jury of citizens independent of the agency is the cure.
4. The government keeps its options. After Jarkesy, the SEC may still bring fraud cases. It simply must bring penalty cases where a jury can hear them, as it always could.

The verdict: the civil jury is not an inconvenience to good government. It is one of the conditions of it.

What it means for a family

Picture a small business owner, a hypothetical machine-shop owner in Ohio, who receives a notice that a federal agency is seeking a substantial civil penalty for a violation she disputes. Before Jarkesy, depending on the statute, she might have faced a hearing before an official employed by the same agency, with the facts decided by that official and the agency's commissioners. After Jarkesy, if the penalty is for conduct resembling a common-law wrong, she can insist that citizens from her district decide whether she did what the agency says.

That is not a technicality. It is the difference between being judged by your accuser and being judged by your peers. We make the case for the citizen's role in Jury Duty Is the Rule of Law in Your Own Town, So Answer the Summons and against rule by agency in Conservatives Are Not Against Government, We Are Against Rule by Bureau.

The case in brief

1. The Seventh Amendment preserves the right to a civil jury in suits at common law above twenty dollars and bars federal courts from re-examining a jury's facts except by common-law rules.
2. It exists because the Anti-Federalists remembered juryless vice-admiralty courts and refused to ratify a Constitution silent on civil juries.
3. Courts decide whether it applies by comparing the claim to 1791 actions and, above all, by asking whether the remedy is legal, as in Curtis v. Loether (1974) and Tull v. United States (1987).
4. SEC v. Jarkesy (2024) held that an agency seeking civil penalties for fraud must go before a jury, closing a door Congress had opened in 2010.
5. A jury of citizens independent of the government is the oldest check on an agency that writes, enforces and judges its own rules.

What you can do: answer your next jury summons and serve, and read the Seventh Amendment on our Constitution page so you know what that service protects.