“It is well known that in civil causes, in courts of equity and admiralty, juries do not intervene; and that courts of equity use the trial by jury only in extraordinary cases, to inform the conscience of the court. When, therefore, we find that the [7th] amendment requires that the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, in suits at common law, the natural conclusion is, that this distinction was present to the minds of the framers of the amendment. By _common law_ they meant what the constitution denominated in the third article ‘law;’ not merely suits which the _common_ law recognized among its old and settled proceedings; but suits in which _legal_ rights were to be ascertained and determined, in contradistinction to those in which equitable rights alone were recognized, and equitable remedies were administered, or in which, as in the admiralty, a mixture of public law, and of maritime law and equity, was often found in the same suit. Probably there were few, if any, states in the Union, in which some new legal remedies, differing from the old common law forms, were not in use; but in which, however, the trial by jury intervened, and the general regulations in other respects were according to the course of the common law. Proceedings in cases of partition, and of foreign and domestic attachment, might be cited as examples variously adopted and modified. _In a just sense, the amendment, then, may well be construed to embrace all suits, which are not of equity or admiralty jurisdiction_, WHATEVER MAY BE THE PECULIAR FORM WHICH THEY MAY ASSUME TO SETTLE LEGAL RIGHTS.”--_Parsons_ VS. _Bedford_, 3 _Peters’s Rep._ 456, 7. The last sentence I have underscored. In this sentence, the supreme court plainly say, that, if the subject matter of the litigation, or the object of the proceeding, be to determine a “legal right” which was formerly determined by a “suit at common law,” then such proceeding is embraced in the seventh amendment, and either party in interest has a right to the trial by jury. Now, is it not clear that any proceeding which determines whether a man owns himself, or is owned by another man, and which delivers one man into the custody of another, as his slave, or refuses so to deliver him, is, “whatever peculiar form it may assume,” a proceeding “to settle a legal right,”--the highest legal right? It is not a right in equity, in admiralty, or under the maritime law; but strictly and exclusively a _legal right_, and nothing else. According to the doctrine of the supreme court, then, in the above-cited case, the parties to such a proceeding have a right, under the seventh amendment, to a trial by jury. At least, is not such the “_spirit_” of the amendment?