Cite as: 524 U. S. 321 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
The text and history of the Excessive Fines Clause demonstrate the centrality of proportionality to the excessiveness inquiry; nonetheless, they provide little guidance as to how disproportional a punitive forfeiture must be to the gravity of an offense in order to be "excessive." Excessive means surpassing the usual, the proper, or a normal measure of proportion. See 1 N. Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) (defining excessive as "beyond the common measure or proportion"); S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language 680 (4th ed. 1773) ("[b]eyond the common proportion"). The constitutional question that we address, however, is just how proportional to a criminal offense a fine must be, and the text of the Excessive Fines Clause does not answer it.
Nor does its history. The Clause was little discussed in the First Congress and the debates over the ratification of the Bill of Rights. As we have previously noted, the Clause was taken verbatim from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. See Browning-Ferris Industries of Vt., Inc. v. Kelco Disposal, Inc., 492 U. S., at 266-267. That document's prohibition against excessive fines was a reaction to the abuses of the King's judges during the reigns of the Stuarts, id., at 267, but the fines that those judges imposed were described contemporaneously only in the most general terms. See Earl of Devonshire's Case, 11 State Tr. 1367, 1372 (H. L. 1689) (fine of £30,000 "excessive and exorbitant, against Magna Charta, the common right of the subject, and the law of the land"). Similarly, Magna Charta--which the Stuart judges were accused of subverting--required only that amercements (the medieval predecessors of fines) should be proportioned to the offense and that they should not deprive a wrongdoer of his livelihood:
"A Free-man shall not be amerced for a small fault, but after the manner of the fault; and for a great fault after the greatness thereof, saving to him his contenement; (2) and a Merchant likewise, saving to him his
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