I'm outlining for my Federal Civil Procedure final on Thursday, and I've just hit the portion about juries. There's a few things you need to know about juries in a federal court: the Seventh Amendment guarantees your right to have a trial by jury... sometimes.
Disclaimer: the historical account I'm about to give you is probably mostly false, but it's the general gist, and it's what you'd need to know to get the gripe I'm going to explain at the end.
You see, back in England, whose legal system we based ours on in the 1780s, there were two types of civil courts: law and chancery. A legal court dealt with all kinds of formalities of law. A lot of the big stuff like you'd imagine - when one person steals another's chicken, for example. The courts of law might award a money value for that chicken and tell the thief to pay it back before they lopped of his hands.
But the chancery courts dealt with equitable solutions - trying to make it right, even if the law would exclude a thing by, say, a statute of limitations. And those become known, here, as courts of equity.
But when we established our Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, we did away with the two separate courts. We simplified it by saying that federal district courts would handle both kinds.
And then we run into a problem: the Seventh Amendment has been interpreted to provide, in Federal courts, a right to a jury trial for legal actions only - not for suits in equity. And since we no longer have a special federal court of equity, what do we do? Well, the American Legal System, in its infinite wisdom has come up with a simple rule: if the case would appear in a court of equity in 1790s England, it's in equity today; if the case would appear in a court of law in 1790s England, it's in law today. Sounds weird and indirect, but okay, right?
So here's where my gripe comes in:
In 1990, a case went to the US Supreme Court, called Chauffers, Teamsters & Helpers, Local No. 391. v. Terry. In it, black workers were suing their union because the union refused to prosecute their employer on their behalf. They were suing on the theory that the union was not abiding by its duty to fairly represent workers. So the Supreme Court was asked: do they get a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment?
So, the Court wants to apply the rule stated above, but here's the hitch: workers unions were banned in 1790s England. So the Court did what all courts have to do in this position - they had to improvise. First, the court says, "Well, it's kinda like a trust, in that the union operates independently from and in the best interests of the workers. That makes it sounds like equity."
Then the court says, "Well, it's also like legal malpractice, in that the union is supposed to represent the workers and be their advocate. That's more like law. But then again, the workers can't fire their union..."
So then the court looks to see what the workers are looking for. If they're looking for money damages, it's law, but if they're looking for the actual performance of a contractually-bound duty, then it's equity. So the workers are asking for their back-pay. But even that's not so simple. If the workers are trying to get back-pay out of the employer, it's a duty, it's equity. If the workers are trying to get the back-pay out of the union, then it's money damages, and it's law.
The court eventually decides that they get a jury trial, and then they send it back to the very earliest court to actually talk about the merits. But all this fuss because we have to figure out how England would have done it two hundred years ago? Dumb.
