Letter: Summary judgements are unconstitutional

From: Brian Vukadinovich

Wheatfield

We need to have a serious conversation in our country about the federal courts’ penchant for routinely granting summary judgments in favor of corporations and government agencies in cases brought by citizens of our country for their legal redresses against wrongdoing.

For clarification, “summary judgment” is a procedure that corporations and government agencies utilize in order to convince federal judges to throw out cases so that a person doesn’t have an opportunity to present his/her case to a jury.

Federal judges across the country are passing out favorable summary judgment rulings to corporations and government agencies as if they were giving candy to a baby.

The federal Constitution is the supreme law of the land and the Seventh Amendment explicitly states “In Suits at common law..the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of common law.”

Somewhere along the way, lawyers and judges decided to put roadblocks in place to prevent people from getting their cases to a jury via the use of a summary judgment motion — notwithstanding that the “right” to a jury trial “shall be preserved” by virtue of the Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In my opinion, the use of a summary judgment motion is an impermissible and unconstitutional intrusion against citizens’ rights to a jury trial as summary judgments interfere with the citizens’ fundamental right to seek redress under the Seventh Amendment.

If the Seventh Amendment is to have any meaning, then corrective measures need to be taken to remedy this governmental injustice in order that the peoples’ rights to a trial by jury under the Seventh Amendment are preserved and not abused as is currently happening with the unconstitutional process of summary judgments.

Federal judges should no longer ignore the peoples’ rights to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment in order to protect corporations and government agencies who are abusing peoples’ rights. The Constitution forbids it!