Court Opinion

ID: 9760958
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 01:26:16.741482+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:19.184078
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Bok :
I concur in Mr. Justice Eagen’s result and reasoning but wish to add a word because of the difficulty he mentions in determining what is meant by consortium. In the English case cited in his opinion, Best v. Samuel Fox & Co., Ld. (1952), A.C. 716, Lord Goddard said, citing Bracton’s De Legibus Angliae, Blackstone’s Commentaries, and Holdsworth’s History of English Law, “ — and there are no books of higher authority — [they] all show that the action which the law gives to the husband for loss of consortium is founded on the proprietary right which from ancient times it was considered the husband had in his wife. It was in fact based on the same ground as gave a master a right to sue for an injury to his servant if the latter was thereby unable to perform his duties. It was an action of trespass for an invasion of the proprietary right which, arising from the status of villeinage or serfdom, a master had in his servant.”
*159I shouldn’t care to extend to wives, in their current state of emancipation, any such notions as that about their husbands or give them a right necessarily based on them. Better even than equality in the right of consortium is thus to reveal its true basis in the hope that the unreality of the husband’s right may become apparent in the light of the times and result in its abolition.