Seventh Amendment To The United States Constitution - History and Development

History and Development

Prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, English judges were seen as "lions under the throne", servile creatures of the King. As English judges held their sinecures at the pleasure of the King, they were sometimes biased in favor of the King and did not always make their rulings in an impartial manner. As such, the jury was an essential countervailing force against tyranny, insofar as the jury had every right to ignore a judge's instructions, thwarting even the will of the King. William Blackstone wrote that it was "the most transcendent privilege which any subject can enjoy, or wish for, that he cannot be affected either in his property, his liberty, or his person, but by the unanimous consent of twelve of his neighbours and equals."

Whereas English judges won their independence from the Crown in the Act of Settlement 1701, American colonial judges still served at the pleasure of the King. King George III of Great Britain abolished trial by jury in the Colonies, one of the main grievances precipitating the American Revolution. As America's Founding Fathers shared a perfect horror at the concept of arbitrary courts of justice, such as those "of Philip in the Netherlands, in which life and property were daily confiscated without a jury, and which occasioned as much misery and a more rapid depopulation of the province", they incorporated the right to trial by jury into the Bill of Rights, thereby restoring what soon-to-be United States Supreme Court Justice James Iredell described as that "noble palladium of liberty", and protecting it from the reach of future legislators. In Joseph Story's 1833 treatise Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, he wrote, "t is a most important and valuable amendment; and places upon the high ground of constitutional right the inestimable privilege of a trial by jury in civil cases, a privilege scarcely inferior to that in criminal cases, which is conceded by all to be essential to political and civil liberty."

"The right of trial by Jury is a fundamental law, made sacred by the Constitution, and cannot be legislated away." According to Senator Richard Henry Lee, the primary purpose of the trial by jury in America was to protect the public from corrupt or aristocratic judges:

The impartial administration of justice, which secures both our persons and our properties, is the great end of civil society. But if that be entirely intrusted to the magistracy,--a select body of men, and those generally selected, by the prince, of such as enjoy the highest offices of the state,--these decisions, in spite of their own natural integrity, will have frequently an involuntary bias towards those of their own rank and dignity. It is not to be expected from human nature, that the few should always be attentive to the good of the many." The learned judge further says, that "every tribunal, selected for the decision of facts, is a step towards establishing aristocracy—the most oppressive of all governments."