7th Amendment - Intellectual

[Verse 1]

The early on quite celebrated

Mostly unincorporated

Access to a jury in a

Federal civil case

Made it easy to do business for

The planting class in days of yore

Whose enterprises-they felt-were

Excised in excess ways

What are rights within a nation built by slaves?

Where mass expropriation is the order of the day?

The framers kept their vision on the dream that they were living

And so made grievous elision of their contradicting ways

But through the nineteenth century

This right was claimed increasingly

By people who'd been pointedly

Excluded from the law

And though most juristic members were

White male landholding lenders

Access haltingly extended

As its use began to fall

What does it take for bodies politic to change?

When the letters of the law in many ways just stay the same?

The Supreme Court never managed to take adequate advantage

In not doing so were damaged what advances could be claimed

Though seven does still stand today

Its power's mostly passed away

To pretrial schemes and fees to pay

To get your day in court

Through many means it's gone and went

Whether by disenfranchisement

Or court-coercive settlement

Or arbitration clause

Is it entitlement that comes at such a cost?

When for most, the price of entry is already quite a loss?

Old number seven proved effective for the ones who did erect it

But when the courts could not protect it, to obscurity it crossed