Celebrate Our 7th Amendment on Bill of Rights Day 2025
Our Constitutional Right to Civil Jury Trials Protect Our Guaranteed Freedoms
December 15th is Bill of Rights Day. It was on December 15, 1791, that the first 10 amendments to our United States Constitution were ratified and became law—234 years ago this year. It is a day for us to remember and celebrate the most fundamental of our American rights enshrined and protected there.
How many of those rights can you name? Most of us know the ones preserved in the 1st and 2nd amendments. Some may know that “Pleading the Fifth” means asserting your 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. Others may cite the “states’ rights” preserved by the 10th Amendment. After that it gets a little fuzzy.
Among those “other” amendments is our right to trial by jury—a right so fundamental and important to America’s founders that it is preserved in two of the Bill of Rights’ ten amendments. The 6th Amendment preserves your right to trial by a jury of your peers when you’re charged with a crime. The 7th Amendment protects your right to trial by jury in civil cases.
Too often overlooked or forgotten, I believe that the 7th Amendment is one of the most important and critical in the entire Bill of Rights.
First, it can be argued that the other nine owe their very existence to the 7th Amendment. In the decades before the American Revolution, the British government tried to limit colonial challenges to the laws they believed to be unfair. Americans challenged these laws in colonial courts in front of colonial juries. Their right to do so was first guaranteed in the 1215 Magna Carta and reaffirmed in the 1689 British Bill of Rights.
Colonial juries struck down the laws they believed were wrong or refused to convict colonists accused of disobeying laws criminally. In response Great Britain limited and then took away the colonial right to jury trials. Americans cited the loss of trial by jury in nearly every challenge to British authority, including the response to the Stamp Act. Today we all know the phrase “no taxation without representation,” but it also states that “trial by jury is the inherent and invaluable right of every British subject in these colonies.” The loss of trial by jury is cited in both the 1775 Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, and in our Declaration of Independence. The right to jury trials was included in all 13 of the new state constitutions written after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Despite this history, the proposed 1787 United States Constitution preserved only the right to jury trials in criminal cases. The drafters omitted the right to trial by jury in civil cases, and it wasn’t discovered until just days before the vote. Both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists believed this was a significant problem. James Madison wrote that “trial by jury is essential to secure the liberty of the people,” and Patrick Henry stated that it was the “best appendage of freedom.” The need to preserve the right to trial by jury in civil cases led directly to the Massachusetts Compromise, which called for a formal Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution. The other nine rights preserved there owe the very existence of that document to the 7th Amendment right to jury trials in civil cases.
Second, and perhaps even more important, is that it is our 7th Amendment right to trial by jury in civil cases that protects every other right and liberty we have as Americans. As in the Revolutionary Era, our citizen juries are important check on unlimited government overreach still today.
Justice Joseph Story wrote in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution that the “inestimable privilege of trial by jury in civil cases . . . [is] essential to political and civil liberty.” Why? Because in our courtrooms, in front of a jury of our peers, we are equal to our government and other powerful interests. If the government passes bad laws, we can challenge them in our courts in front of a jury of our peers. Limits on free speech or religion? Restrictions on our right to bear arms? Illegal searches of our homes? The government seizing our property? It is our 7th Amendment right to trial by jury that allows us to challenge these bad laws and get them struck down.
This critical role is what makes the current threat to the 7th Amendment so frightening. Today, billion-dollar corporations, the insurance industry, and their lobbyists want to limit or deny citizens’ access to our civil courts even though that is a guaranteed constitutional right. Their goal is to increase their huge profits and insulate themselves from being held accountable in our courts, while leaving their employees, customers, and the rest of us powerless against them. At the same time restricting or eliminating the right to jury trial It would leave us at the mercy of government agencies and bureaucrats too.
Justice Hugo Black wrote that, “It is essential that the right of trial by jury be scrupulously safeguarded as the bulwark of civil liberty. Our duty to preserve the 7th Amendment is a matter of high constitutional importance.” Chief Justice William Rehnquist called this right “sacred” and said that the 7th Amendment should be jealously guarded.”
On this Bill of Rights Day, we should commit ourselves to protecting our 7th Amendment rights with the same energy and passion we have when we protect those better-known amendments. Every right and liberty we enjoy depends on it.
Beth A. White
This column was published by the Charleston Gazette-Mail in the December 13, 2025 Weekend Edition
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