Common Law

Amendment VII

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 otherwise be re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

In 1791 twenty dollars was a lot of money to most people, it meant that this statute was not meant to apply to every trivial little dispute that came down the pike.  In fact, there are several ways to calculate the actual value that a 1791 twenty-twen represents in today's dollars.  The results are interesting to say the least. You will of course notice that the low end of the spectrum is not that impressive, both the GDP deflator method and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) method tell us that $20 in 1791 is somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 today in terms of purchasing power.  However, as an indicator of economic power check out this analysis of what the different methods tell us.  Of particular interest to me was the fact that in terms of economic influence the share of GDP method is actually of value, yes that's the $1,690,000.00 figure.  The article referenced above compared Warren Buffet and John D. Rockafeller in terms of overall power, and found that Rockafeller with a mere $1.4 billion net worth was nearly four times as powerful in his day than Buffet with a net worth of $62 billion.
Why does this matter?  Because the world is different now than it was then and, as I have stated previously, we obviously need to do some interpretation, which leads us to less than black and white conclusions.  What should the threshold for a jury trial in a common law case be?  Surely even the strict constructionists don't want a bunch of $20 lawsuits clogging up the courts, right?  What about $500, is that worth the time and trouble?  Admittedly, $1.7 million is probably a bit of a high threshold but jury trials are expensive and time consuming, and forcing certain types of minor issues through jury trials has created a theater of the absurd in certain corners of the legal system.  Not to mention the fact that a jury is far from the sacred institution that our beloved founders probably envisioned.  These days juries can be misled and manipulated and sometimes just be wrong.  They can award exorbitant punitive damages because some defendant came across as smug, and they can deny justice to a plaintiff who is just frankly an annoying human being.  Juries are made up of humans, who have an emotional response to being stuck listening to a couple of angry neighbors arguing about cracks in the sidewalk or a tree falling on someone's roof.
But the large majority of legal stuff that happens is common law stuff, and so this ends up being really important.  Despite what TV might represent, most legal stuff is stiflingly boring.  It's lawyers and paperwork.  Ask a lawyer you know, we all know at least a few, most of them will be able to count actual arguments in front of an actual jury on one hand, and a good number of them will admit to never having done it ever.
But trial by jury is an important right we have, should we ever need it.  It is, however, in most cases in our best interest to not need it.  Which fact leads me to one of the overarching realities of making sense of our rights as citizens: often times the system requires us to be sensible about exercising those rights.  In college, I was required to take Business Law 243, a basic course in common law for us science types who might someday have some sort of interface with our esteemed legal system.  The professor asked us early on in the semester: "What are you allowed to sue people for?"  Most of us, being neophytes to the law started talking about negligence or serious harm depending on whether we focused on the cause or the effect of the infraction.  He fielded a few of our tentative answers, some of which sounded actually pretty reasonable.  Then finally, when he had had his fun, he said, "You can sue anybody for anything at any time."
The result was predictably stunned silence.  This was a man who had actually done a good bit of argument in front of juries, he looked vaguely like Perry Mason, which didn't hurt the over all impact, and had a large booming voice.  "Of course, you have to prove damages, and you have to make your burden of proof that there was intent or negligence or some of the things you were all talking about. None of your answers were all wrong, but you need to know that the law actually allows for civil lawsuits to be brought for pretty much any reason."  He went on to explain how and why frivolous lawsuits were punished by the legal system and how, in his opinion, tort reform was the single most important issue that needed to be addressed in our legal system to weed out the nonsense that just bogs us down and prevents us doing the really important work of peace and justice.
That is most of what I remember from BLAW 243, but it made an impression, and gave me a rather different trajectory on all things legal than I would have had otherwise.  And it also made me rather grateful that our system is separated out into civil and criminal law, and that we have lawyers who know what they're doing, or else we'd all be in a heap of trouble.