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.

The Seventh Amendment’s Reexamination Clause prohibits reexamination in any federal court of a “fact tried by a jury” other “than according to the rules of the common law.” 1 In 1913, in Slocum v. New York Life Insurance Co.,2 the Supreme Court held that a federal appeals court lacked authority to order the entry of a judgment contrary to a trial court’s verdict. Even though the Court agreed that the trial court should have directed a verdict for the defendant before the case was submitted to the jury, the Court reasoned that, once the trial court declined to do so and the jury found for the plaintiff contrary to the evidence, the only course open to either court was to order a new trial.3 Although plainly in accordance with the common law as it stood in 1791, the 5-4 decision was subjected to significant criticism.4 Slocum, however, was then limited, if not completely undermined, by subsequent holdings.5

In the first of these cases, the Court in Baltimore & Carolina Line v. Redman6 held that a trial court had the right to enter a judgment for the plaintiff on the verdict of the jury after having reserved decision on the defendant’s motion for directed verdict. The Court distinguished Slocum, noting its ruling qualified some of its assertions in Slocum.7

In Lyon v. Mutual Benefit Ass’n,8 the Court sustained a district court in rejecting the defendant’s motion for dismissal and in peremptorily directing a verdict for the plaintiff. The Supreme Court held that there was ample evidence to support the verdict and that the trial court, in following Arkansas’s procedure in the diversity action, acted consistently with the Federal Conformity Act.9

In Galloway v. United States,10 which involved an action against the government for benefits under a lapsed war risk insurance policy, the trial court directed a verdict for the government on the ground of insufficiency of evidence. Both the appeals court and the Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s order.11 Justice Hugo Black, joined by Justices William Douglas and Frank Murphy asserted in dissent: “Today’s decision marks a continuation of the gradual process of judicial erosion which in one-hundred-fifty years has slowly worn away a major portion of the essential guarantee of the Seventh Amendment.” 12 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Court has occasionally experienced difficulty in harmonizing the historic common law covering the relations of judge and jury with the notion of a developing common law.13

Footnotes

1

U.S. Const. amend. VII.

2

228 U.S. 364 (1913).

3

Id. at 399.

4

See, e.g., Fleming James, Civil Procedure 332–33 & n.8 (1965); Austin W. Scott, The Progress of the Law, 1918–1919 Civil Procedure, 33 Harv. L. Rev., 236, 246 (1919).

5

But see Hetzel v. Prince William Cnty., 523 U.S. 208 (1998) (when an appeals court affirms liability, but orders the level of damages to be reconsidered, the plaintiff has a Seventh Amendment right either to accept the reduced award or to have a new trial).

6

295 U.S. 654 (1935).

7

Id. at 661. Justice Willis Van Devanter authored the Court’s opinions in Redman and Slocum.

8

305 U.S. 484 (1939).

9

Ch. 255, § 5, 17 Stat. 197 (1872), now superseded by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

10

319 U.S. 372, 389 (1943). The Galloway Court wrote: “the practice has been approved explicitly in the promulgation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure” (citing Berry v. United States, 312 U.S. 450 (1941)). In Berry, the Court remarked that the new rule has given “district judges, under certain circumstances, . . . the right (but not the mandatory duty) to enter a judgment contrary to the jury’s verdict without granting a new trial. But that rule has not taken away from juries and given to judges any part of the exclusive power of juries to weigh evidence and determine contested issues of facts—a jury being the constitutional tribunal provided for trying facts in courts of law.” Id. at 452–53.

11

See id. at 373.

12

Id. at 397 (Black, J., dissenting). Because the case involved a claim against the United States, it did not need to be tried by a jury except for to the extent that Congress had allowed.

13

See, e.g., Neely v. Martin K. Eby Construction Co., Inc., 386 U.S. 317 (1967) (interpreting Rules 50(b), 50(c)(2) and 50(d) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as well as the Seventh Amendment).