Title: I Lost at Trial - In the Court of Appeals!: The Expanding Power of the Federal Appellate Courts to Reexamine Facts
Abstract: In just the past few years, the United States Supreme Court, in a sharp break with more 150 years of Seventh Amendment jurisprudence, has transferred to federal appellate courts meaningful power to supplant jury verdicts. This power, in effect, permits significant de novo review of jury fact-finding. Thus, the Court's recent decisions have dramatically undermined the jury's supremacy as the first and final fact-finder. In the past five years, the Supreme Court has issued three decisions expanding federal appellate court power into the fact-finding arena by directly contravening its own long-established precedent. The subject matters of these three decisions were distinctly unrelated: the application of Erie principles to a New York law supplying a state-court standard of review; the admission of expert evidence on review from the denial of a motion for judgment as a matter of law; and the review of a punitive damages award in a trademark action. These substantive distinctions have largely obscured the Court's underlying procedural revolution. The Supreme Court's intrusion into jury fact-finding is the very evil contemplated by the Framers, and the very evil the Seventh Amendment was intended to prevent. The Supreme Court's intrusion into the discretionary power of the district court also implicates the Seventh Amendment by, in effect, permitting appellate reexamination of jury fact-finding in a manner other than according to the rules of the common law. Thus, both developments upset the Framers' concept of the respective spheres of the trial courts and juries versus the federal appellate courts.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-11-21
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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