Seventh-Amendment

The Public Rights Doctrine

The public-rights doctrine is the Seventh Amendment scope limitation that lets Congress channel adjudication of newly-created statutory rights to non-Article-III administrative tribunals without violating the jury-trial guarantee. The doctrine was articulated most fully in Atlas Roofing Co. v. OSHA (1977), and has been substantially narrowed by a doctrinal trajectory running through Granfinanciera (1989), Stern v. Marshall (2011), and SEC v. Jarkesy (2024). The Jarkesy decision held that the SEC's in-house adjudication of civil penalties for securities fraud violates the Seventh Amendment because the underlying claim is analogous to a common-law action for fraud. The doctrinal trajectory is toward greater Seventh Amendment protection in administrative adjudication — one of the few areas of administrative law currently undergoing substantial movement. The doctrine matters for the Adverse Review project because it sits at the Lens III public/private interface and because movement-adjacent literature regularly reads the doctrine as a metaphysical claim about sovereignty ownership of statutory rights rather than as the narrow procedural-scope distinction it actually is.