Stephanie L. answered • 04/17/20
Tutor with Elementary School Experience
The Seventh Amendment gives individuals the right to a jury trial in civil cases if the amount in controversy exceeds a certain threshold.
A civil case is a legal case that is not criminal, and is usually when one person or business is suing another person or business over an amount of money that they think the other person owes them. The parties go to court if they cannot agree to settle the issue out of court, and they can go to trial. A trial is where each side (the side suing and the side being sued) present their side of the case in front of either a judge or a jury (a panel of non-judges who are supposed to be your peers), and that judge or jury decides who wins or loses the case based on each side's arguments. What the Seventh Amendment guarantees is that, if you want a jury to decide your case instead of a judge, you have the right to have that happen. Congress cannot make a law that says you cannot have a jury in a civil case, and courts cannot deny your request for a jury trial.
The framers wrote the Seventh Amendment because they wanted to guarantee everyone the option to have their peers (non-judges like them) decide their case instead of judges, who they feared may be loyal to the government instead of the individual. That was a huge problem the colonists were having with the king, where the colonists were losing all of their judicial cases because judges were loyal to the king instead of them. They felt that if lay people like them were deciding the case instead, then they would win more cases, so they guaranteed that that would always be an option for people in their new nation.
