Deconstructing Juryless Fact-Finding in Civil Cases

Abstract

This Article investigates compensatory damage caps as an impermissible and ill-advised legislative mandate of juryless fact-finding in certain categories of common law based civil cases. This Article explores juryless fact-finding in civil cases by turning to recent Sixth Amendment jurisprudence on mandatory criminal sentencing guidelines. At first blush, compensatory damage caps and criminal sentencing guidelines appear to have little in common. Caps reduce a jury’s damage findings to a fixed amount. Some mandatory sentencing guidelines schemes designated which facts were necessary to support a particular sentence. Yet, both remove the jury during a significant part of a civil or criminal case. In civil cases the jury is removed from the “damages” phase of the litigation; in criminal cases, from the “punishment” phase of the "criminal prosecution." As a result, compensatory damage caps and mandatory criminal sentencing guidelines lessen the jury’s role as fact-finder and intrude on the jury’s verdict or decree.

Seventh Amendment jurisprudence remains undeveloped on the clash between compensatory damage caps and the civil jury. But the Sixth Amendment, which has rejected mandatory juryless fact-finding for purposes of fixing punishment, offers three lessons about common law criminal juries that should apply in the civil context. First, modern procedures cannot significantly alter certain common law characteristics of the jury trial right. Second, mandatory removal of the jury as the primary fact-finder was not authorized in common law cases. Third, a common law jury’s factual determinations were fully enforceable unless exceptional circumstances were presented. This Article urges adoption of cap alternatives that encourage individual review upon necessity. Such alternatives should also advance a states’ dual interest to protect civilly liable defendants against unreasonably high awards and severely injured plaintiffs against unreasonably low awards.