HUSBANDS’ LIABILITIES.

Western Star, Issue 278, 4 January 1879, Page 2 (Supplement)

HUSBANDS’ LIABILITIES.

! Hardly a week passes while the law courts ; are in session without fresh illustration being furnished of the mischief caused.by the confused state of the law regarding married women’s control of property. Two glaring cases have been decided during the past few days at Westminster. In the first, an officer’s wife, having about as barge a separate income as he had, and being in the habit of paying for her clothes with her own cheques, now divorced and married again, incurred a large debt to her milliner in order to obtain a handsome trousseau for her elopement with the gentleman who has become her second husband. The circumstances under which the liability was contracted must have made it especially offensive to the first husband that he should bo expected to meet it, and we congratulate him on the prompt verdict of the jury in his favor, la the second case a gentleman with considerable property was sued for the amount of a butcher’s bill for meat supplied to his family during the time when he was in a lunatic asylum, the defence being that his wife, having command of all his income during his temporary lunacy, had no right to pledge his credit beyond that amount. This shabby plea was happily rejected by the jury. In both cases it is evident that justice has been done, but it is not always so. Wherever married women are concerned the intricacies and anomalies of the law are apt to lead to practical injustice, and even where there are no intricacies or anomalies, opportunity is afforded for grasping and litigious plaintiffs or defendants to raise frivolous and costly issues. This is injurious to the public as well as to the individuals immediately concerned, but there is poor chance of matteis being mended before the position of wives as owners of separate property, or recognised agents of their husbands, is clearly defined, — 1 Weekly Despatch, ■