While driving one day with my 14-year-old son, I asked him, "What constitutional amendment protects freedom of speech?" His response, the First Amendment, came easily.

But when I asked about the right to a jury trial, he couldn’t answer. Unfortunately, like him, many Americans are unaware that the Seventh Amendment protects a bedrock principle of democracy as important as free speech.

Corporate America is engaged in an unprecedented and multifaceted attack on the right to a civil jury trial. Powerful business and insurance interests seek immunity, damages caps, procedural protections, and one-sided fee limits to insulate themselves from juries—and for good reason. Corporate America can influence politicians and the election or appointment of judges, but juries— members of the community who come together in the courtroom to decide matters of great social importance—are beyond their grasp.

When the Seventh Amendment was drafted, jurors were described as "sentinels and guardians" of the people. The idea was that ordinary citizens would provide a check against government power. Alexis de Tocqueville noted:

The institution of the jury . . . places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed. . . . The jury system as it is understood in America appears to me to be as direct and as extreme a consequence of the sovereignty of the people as universal suffrage. They are two instruments of equal power, which contribute to the supremacy of the majority.

Today, the jury remains a core element of the American populist tradition. Polling by ATLA shows that the public believes corporations have far too much power in our society and that people trust the jury to equalize that power. For example:

• Eighty-five percent of people surveyed agreed with the statement, "I trust juries, who are made up of people like myself, my friends and my neighbors, to make the right decision."

• Eighty-four percent agreed that "individuals in our legal system should have rights that are at least equal to the rights corporations have in the legal system."

• Seventy-three percent were concerned that "corporations seem to have more rights in our legal system than individuals do."

The public trusts the jury system more than it does politicians to set this country on the right course. Many citizens’ most important involvement in our democracy, outside the polling booth, is on a jury.

Jurors’ decisions can bring dramatic, positive changes in corporate conduct and in product and environmental safety. In some cases, a jury has more impact than an entire bureaucracy. In 1970, in TRIAL’s first presidential column, Richard Markus wrote:

The private remedy has proven itself to be a powerful social tool in civil rights, antitrust, and securities matters. The courts and legislative bodies of this nation should make every effort to encourage reasonable private remedies, while recognizing that any excesses will be curbed by the same courts and juries who will find that a particular remedy has gone too fast or too far to accord with the community conscience.

He was right then and is right now. ATLA strongly resists any legislative attempts to restrict the right of our citizen-jurors to render proper judgments. We take this position because it is right. We need to educate our children, our neighbors, and our legislators about the paramount importance of our jury system.

In 1788, Alexander Hamilton stated it well:

The friends and adversaries of the plan of the (constitutional) convention, if they agree on nothing else, concur at least in the value they have set upon the trial by jury; or if there is any difference between them it consists in this: The former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government.

The time has come for American citizens to understand that the right to a jury trial is every bit as important as their right to speak freely or to vote. We have an obligation to get this message out. As Markus wrote more than 30 years ago, "We have a duty to evangelize—to explain the critical role played by trial lawyers, to restore public confidence in their actions, and to reestablish public acceptance of law as the ultimate strength of organized humanity."

Tort "reform" is wrong because it erodes the right of citizens to make decisions that hold wrongdoers accountable. Let’s carry the banner of the Seventh Amendment as proudly as the founders of our country would have wanted us to do.

David S. Casey Jr.