The Complicated Story of How Much Twenty Dollars Actually is with Respect to the 7th Amendment to the US Constitution

The 7th Amendment to the US Constitution provides that "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."

So what does this mean? Well, going by the Coinage Act of 1792, that established a dollar as being at parity with the Spanish dollar (after considering the wear and tear on the coin), it might be that we ought to use the current rate of silver to establish what a proper value is in interpreting the clause. However, there is a problem:

The Constitution actually says “twenty dollars”, not 20 dollar coins. Why is this important? Well, the same Coinage Act of 1792 allows for the minting of $10 GOLD coins (called Eagles) that weigh 16.04g pure or 17.5g standard gold. So there is actually a discrepancy and thus it is subject to interpretation whether in a world where the value of silver and gold fluctuate relative to one another (sorry – the US Constitution really cannot change that singular fact). Given the current world price of Gold and Silver, we can EITHER choose to use gold OR silver. I think it is best to choose gold. As I write this, the value of silver is a mere $0.49 per gram of pure silver based on federal reserve notes (I will leave the Constitutionality of fiat for another day but let’s just say that we are using our current fiat money for sake of argument). That leads us to a value today in terms of the 7th Amendment of $0.49/g x 24.1 x 20 = . $236.18.


Oh, and the coinage act allows us to use copper for pennies, which at $0.01/g x 17.1 x 2000 = $342.00


Finally, we can use gold, which based on today’s value would lead us to a value for the 7th Amendment of $41.63 x 16.04 x 2 = $1,335.49.

Now let’s compare that to what the value would be in dollars based on inflation rates (and thus allowing for fiat currency and a strict literal reading of “dollar” but placing it in terms of real value from the Coinage Act of 1792):

$100 in 1792 is equivalent to $510.67 based on the data from this website: https://www.officialdata.org/1792-dollars-in-2017

Hmm….maybe our fiat money isn’t so bad after all in terms of holding up its value relative to gold, silver and copper as we might at first think.

Oh, but it gets EVEN MORE INTERESTING. Why? Well read Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution that states:

“No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.”

So the Federal government was issuing a coin (in copper) that could not be used as “a Tender in Payment of Debts” in any state. Hmm…. Seems like those copper coins were a problem….

In any case, though, it makes sense to use gold, not silver, as the basis for addressing the 7th Amendment because there literally is nothing in the US Constitution that says that we ought to base these decisions on the price of silver. This is also true because a twenty dollar GOLD coin (called a Double Eagle) was used in Spain at that time. The whole “regulate the value thereof” clause was designed to maintain a silver coin’s parity with gold, since you can really only have one standard, not a bimetal standard unless the price of gold and silver are in a fixed exchange rate. Unfortunately, they are not and they cannot be made to be in a fixed exchange rate.

Indeed, the mere fact that the $10 coin was a gold coin argues that the Constitutional provision should be read with gold, rather than silver, in mind.