432
Opinion of the Court
In so ruling, the Court said that the Guaranty Trust "outcome-determination" test was an insufficient guide in cases presenting countervailing federal interests. See Byrd, 356 U. S., at 537. The Court described the counter-vailing federal interests present in Byrd this way:
"The federal system is an independent system for administering justice to litigants who properly invoke its jurisdiction. An essential characteristic of that system is the manner in which, in civil common-law actions, it distributes trial functions between judge and jury and, under the influence—if not the command—of the Seventh Amendment, assigns the decisions of disputed questions of fact to the jury." Ibid. (footnote omitted).
The Seventh Amendment, which governs proceedings in federal court, but not in state court,14 bears not only on the allocation of trial functions between judge and jury, the issue in Byrd; it also controls the allocation of authority to review verdicts, the issue of concern here. The Amendment reads:
"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." U. S. Const., Amdt. 7.
Byrd involved the first Clause of the Amendment, the "trial by jury" Clause. This case involves the second, the "re-examination" Clause. In keeping with the historic unployees. Therefore, defendant maintained, the plaintiff ranked as a "statutory employee" whose sole remedy was under the State's workers' compensation law. The sameness of the work plaintiff and defendant's own employees performed presented a fact question, but in state court, a jury trial would not have been available to resolve it.
14 See Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U. S. 90, 92 (1876).
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