What does the Seventh Amendment guarantee?

The Seventh Amendment states: “In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.” It does two distinct things. First, it guarantees a jury trial in civil, not criminal, cases decided under common law, once the amount in dispute clears a set threshold. Second, and less discussed, its re-examination clause restricts how much a judge can later revisit facts a jury has already found, protecting jury verdicts from being casually overturned after the fact. The “twenty dollars” line is the amendment's most-cited curiosity. In 1791, twenty dollars was a meaningful sum, close to a month's wages for a laborer, so the threshold screened out only genuinely trivial disputes. Because amending the Constitution requires far more than adjusting a dollar figure for inflation, the number has simply never been updated; today it is effectively meaningless, since almost any civil suit brought in federal court exceeds twenty dollars many times over. Courts have instead done the real work of defining the amendment's scope by asking a different question: whether a given type of claim is analogous to one that existed at common law in 1791, or is instead a newer statutory claim, like many modern administrative or regulatory actions, that doesn't automatically carry a jury-trial right. The dollar figure is a historical artifact; the common-law-analogy test is what actually decides modern cases.