Opinion ID: 1215225
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Factors Favoring Abolition of the Immunity Doctrine:

Text: 1. Where the tort is intentional, marital harmony is already lost; the same is probably true whenever one spouse is prepared to sue the other; 2. Litigation between spouses on every other kind of legal theory presently is permissible; saving out only negligent torts is neither symmetrical nor otherwise rational; 3. Almost every other jurisdiction has abolished the doctrine. The foregoing outline of the competing arguments assumes one thing  that the disability at common law was substantive; i.e., that the negligent infliction of harm by a spouse on the person of the other spouse was not a tort. As already indicated, the Apitz court seemed to assume as much, although it never got around to explaining itself. The question is important because, if the disability were only a procedural one imposed by the common-law courts as an incident of those courts' understanding of the consequences of marriage for the separate existence of husband or wife, we could now simply declare  as the Smith court ought to have done, in those circumstance  the disability abolished because the reasons for it are no longer present. We turn to that question. Vir et uxor sunt quasi unica persona, quia caro una et sanguis unus. Bracton, lib. 5, fol. 416 (also cited as lib. 5, Tract. 5, cop. 25) cited in 2 Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, § 291 (18th ed, Hargrove and Butler, eds, 1823). And with this quasi unity went a disability to sue inter se. But what kind of disability? Whatever its nature, Bracton's statement shows that the disability probably already existed in the English common law by the time Columbus landed in the New World. A specific discussion appears in 1 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 442-43 (1765): By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-[F]rench a feme-covert;    is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. A woman indeed may be attorney for her husband; for that implies no separation from, but is rather a representation of, her lord. And a husband may also bequeath any thing to his wife by will; for that cannot take effect till the coverture is determined by his death. The husband is bound to provide his wife with necessaries by law, as much as himself; and if she contracts debts for them, he is obliged to pay them; but for any thing besides necessaries, he is not chargeable.    If the wife be indebted before marriage, the husband is bound afterwards to pay the debt; for he has adopted her and her circumstances together. If the wife be injured in her person or her property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband's concurrence, and in his name, as well as her own: neither can she be sued, without making the husband a defendant. [But a wife could be the victim of, and give testimony with respect to, a crime committed by her husband against her.]   . (Emphasis in original.) On the other hand, Pollock and Maitland offer this summary of the law of husband and wife ( `baron et feme' ) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: If we look for any one thought which governs the whole of this province of law, we shall hardly find it. In particular we must be on our guard against the common belief that the ruling principle is that which sees an `unity of person' between husband and wife. This is a principle which suggests itself from time to time; it has the warrant of holy writ; it will serve to round a paragraph, and may now and again lead us out of or into a difficulty; but a consistently operative principle it can not be. We do not treat the wife as a thing or as somewhat that is neither thing nor person; we treat her as a person. Thus Bracton tells us that if either the husband without the wife, or the wife without the husband, brings an action for the wife's land, the defendant can take exception to this `for they are quasi one person, for they are one flesh and one blood.' But this impracticable proposition is followed by a real working principle:  `for the thing is the wife's own and the husband is guardian as being the head of the wife.' The husband is the wife's guardian:  that we believe to be the fundamental principle; and it explains a great deal, when we remember that guardianship is a profitable right.    [T]he husband's rights in the wife's lands can be regarded as an exaggerated guardianship. The wife's subjection to her husband is often insisted on; she is `wholly within his power,' she is bound to obey him in all that is not contrary to the law of God, she and all her property ought to be at his disposal; she is `under the rod.'   . 2 Pollock & Maitland, History of English Law 405-6 (2d ed 1898) (footnotes omitted). Later in the same volume, the authors say: Another rule that grows dimmer as we trace it backwards is that which denies to the married woman all power of contracting a debt. In 1231 a woman was adjudged to pay a debt for goods bought and money borrowed by her while she was coverte; but stress was laid on the fact that she had quarrelled with her husband and was living apart from him. In 1234 a divorced woman was sued for a debt contracted while the de facto marriage endured.   . (Footnotes omitted.) Id. at 434. The foregoing leaves the basis of the common-law disability, as opposed to its existence, obscure. It was still so in nineteenth-century America: The legal effects of marriage, are generally deducible from the principle of the common law, by which the husband and wife are regarded as one person, and her legal existence and authority in a degree lost or suspended, during the continuance of the matrimonial union.   . 2 Kent, Commentaries on American Law 109 (1827) (citing Coke and Littleton). For our purposes, perhaps the best analytical tool is to see if the consequences one normally would expect of substantive disability actually existed. If the disability were substantive, one would expect to find that a husband was privileged to treat his wife negligently (or worse) without interference from the law. Unfortunately, the answer is once again less than definitive. It does, however, give some hints. Blackstone notes: The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds; and the husband was prohibited to use any violence to his wife   . The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife   . But, with us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband; or, in return, a husband against his wife. Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their ancient privilege: and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour. 1 Blackstone, supra, at 444-45. If the disability were substantive instead of procedural, why was it possible for a wife to obtain legal restraint of her husband (and he of her)? If, as Blackstone documents, such interspousal restraints from certain kinds of acts  admittedly intentional, but interspousal acts nonetheless  were available, is it not at least as likely that the disability that lies at the heart of this case was a procedural one? We do not need to resolve this issue, which has remained unresolved for centuries, in order to state that the theoretical legal underpinning of the Smith decision, that the disability was substantive, is subject to serious question. With this question as to the validity of the underlying assumption of Smith in mind, we turn to a consideration of the methodology to be utilized in cases like the present one in which established common law rules are challenged.