Mr. President, our Framers perceived the jury as one of those local levels of government, one of those institutions that was made up of the people back home not specifically beholden either to this Federal Government or, before the revolution, the British Crown.

Indeed, this view of juries as a critical element of the American democracy prompted Alexis de Tocqueville to observe in `Democracy in America,' `The jury is, above all, a political institution, and it must be regarded in that light in order to be duly appreciated.'

More recently in our modern history, Chief Justice Rehnquist recognized the historical role of the American jury in his dissenting opinion in Parklane Hosiery Co. versus Shore in 1979, in which our current Chief Justice stated, `The founders of our nation considered the right of trial by jury in civil cases an important bulwark against tyranny and corruption, a safeguard too precious to be left to the whim of the sovereign.'

Mr. President, that is what this bill is all about today. This is the sovereign, the Federal Government, choosing to override the right of State and local juries to make the decisions about what a jury should be free to do. This is exactly what Chief Justice Rehnquist must have meant.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the fundamental importance of trial by jury, stating in Dimmick versus Schiedt, that `Maintenance of the jury as a fact-finding body is of such importance and occupies so firm a place in our history and jurisprudence that any seeming curtailment to the right to a jury trial should be scrutinized with the utmost care.'

Tort reform, particularly limits on the amount of damages that juries may award, clearly implicates this right to trial by jury, as a number of State court decisions have held with respect to State laws and constitutional guarantees to trial by jury.

As the Washington Supreme Court found in the Sophie case, statutory damage limits interfere with the jury's traditional function to determine damages.

That case also contains a very instructive discussion of the difference between a trial judge's power of remittitur to reduce a jury verdict and a statutory cap, an overall, across-the-board cap, on the amount of damages a jury can award.

The court observed that the judicial finding that an award is too high in a particular case is fundamentally different from a legislatively imposed `remittitur' that operates automatically in all cases without regard to the facts and justice of the case.

A judge implements remittitur only under well-developed constitutional guidelines that provide that a judge can only reduce a jury's damages determination when that determination was wholly unsupported by the evidence, obviously motivated by passion or prejudice, or when in certain cases it actually shocks the conscience just for a jury to have given such an excessive award.

Mr. President, absent such factors, there is a strong presumption in favor of the jury's determination. And that comes to us all the way back from the Framers and the seventh amendment.

Finally, the opposing party in cases of remittitur has the choice generally of accepting the reduction or seeking a new trial. It is not necessarily completely the end of the line.

None of these safeguards, as was observed by the court in the Sophie case, is present in one of these across-the-board statutory damage limits that is contemplated by the legislation before us.

The system of remittitur thus operates in a fashion very different from the kind of statutory caps that are being advocated by the people who are presenting the so-called tort reform.

Mr. President, I do not intend to get into an extensive debate about whether or not the pending legislation violates the seventh amendment in practical terms, since the seventh amendment has not, to this date, actually been applied to the States through the 14th amendment, although it is certainly applicable, of course, to proceedings in Federal court.

It certainly, however, Mr.