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Cite as: 524 U. S. 321 (1998)

335

Opinion of the Court

The text and history of the Excessive Fines Clause demon-
strate the centrality of proportionality to the excessiveness
inquiry; nonetheless, they provide little guidance as to how
disproportional a punitive forfeiture must be to the gravity
of an offense in order to be “excessive.” Excessive means
surpassing the usual, the proper, or a normal measure of
proportion. See 1 N. Webster, American Dictionary of the
English Language (1828) (deﬁning excessive as “beyond the
common measure or proportion”); S. Johnson, A Dictionary
of the English Language 680 (4th ed. 1773) (“[b]eyond the
common proportion”). The constitutional question that we
address, however, is just how proportional to a criminal of-
fense a ﬁne must be, and the text of the Excessive Fines
Clause does not answer it.

Nor does its history. The Clause was little discussed in
the First Congress and the debates over the ratiﬁcation of
the Bill of Rights. As we have previously noted, the Clause
was taken verbatim from the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
See Browning-Ferris Industries of Vt., Inc. v. Kelco Dis-
posal, Inc., 492 U. S., at 266–267. That document’s prohibi-
tion against excessive ﬁnes was a reaction to the abuses of
the King’s judges during the reigns of the Stuarts, id., at
267, but the ﬁnes that those judges imposed were described
contemporaneously only in the most general terms. See
Earl of Devonshire’s Case, 11 State Tr. 1367, 1372 (H. L.
1689) (ﬁne of £30,000 “excessive and exorbitant, against
Magna Charta, the common right of the subject, and the law
of the land”). Similarly, Magna Charta––which the Stuart
judges were accused of subverting––required only that
amercements (the medieval predecessors of ﬁnes) should be
proportioned to the offense and that they should not deprive
a wrongdoer of his livelihood:

“A Free-man shall not be amerced for a small fault,
but after the manner of the fault; and for a great fault
after the greatness thereof, saving to him his contene-
ment; (2) and a Merchant likewise, saving to him his