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1 1 (December 22, 2022)

handle is hein.crs/govejya0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional_______ ~.Research ervice The Right to a Jury Trial in Civil Cases Part 5: The Bar on Reexamining a Jury's Findings of Fact December 22, 2022 This Legal Sidebar is the fifth in a five-part series that discusses a unique feature of the American legal system-the constitutional right to a jury trial in federal civil cases at law. During the Constitution's ratification, the Anti-Federalist, known by the pseudonym the Federal Farmer, argued that the Constitution should expressly provide a right to civil jury trials because the well born, who would comprise the judiciary, are generally disposed, and very naturally too, to favour those of their own description. Included as part of the Bill of Rights, the right to civil jury trials, according to a 2020 study, is seen by many judges as well as plaintiff and defense attorneys as providing a fairer way to resolve lawsuits than bench trials or arbitration. The use of jury trials to resolve civil cases, however, decreased from 5.5% in 1962 to less than 1% in 2013 with some attributing this to damage caps and mandatory binding arbitration. Members of Congress interested in civil litigation or federal court operations may find the constitutional right to jury trials in civil cases of interest. (For additional background on this topic and citations to relevant sources, see the Constitution of the United States ofAmerica, Analysis and Interpretation.) 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. In 1913, in Slocum v. New York Life Insurance Co., 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. Although plainly in accordance with the common law as it stood in 1791, the five-to-four decision was subject to significant criticism. Slocum, however, was then limited, if not completely undermined, by subsequent holdings. In the first of these cases, the Court in Baltimore & Carolina Line v. Redman held that a trial court had the right to enter a judgment for the plaintiff on the jury's verdict after having reserved decision on the Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10887 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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