8 The Law of Status
The law of status is divisible into two branches dealing respectively with domestic and extra-domestic status. The first of these is the law of family relations, and deals with the nature, acquisition, and loss of all those personal rights, duties, liabilities, and disabilities which are involved in domestic relationship. It falls into three divisions, concerned respectively with marriage, parentage, and guardianship. The second branch of the law of status is concerned with all the personal rights, duties, liabilities, and disabilities, which are external to the law of the family. It deals, for example, with the personal status of minors (in relation to others than their parents), of married women (in relation to others than their husbands and children), of lunatics, aliens, convicts, and any other classes of persons whose personal condition is sufficiently characteristic to call for separate consideration.522
There is one class of personal rights which ought in logical strictness to be dealt with in the law of status, but is commonly and more conveniently considered elsewhere—those rights, namely, which are called natural, because they belong to all men from their birth, instead of being subsequently acquired: for example, the rights of life, liberty, reputation, and freedom from bodily harm. These are personal rights and not proprietary; they constitute part of a man’s status, not part of his estate; yet we seldom find them set forth in the law of status.523 The reason is that such rights, being natural and not acquired, call for no consideration, except in respect of their violation. They are adequately dealt with, therefore, under the head of civil and criminal wrongs. The exposition of the law of libel, for example, which is contained in the law of torts, involves already the proposition that a man has a right to his reputation; and there is no occasion, therefore, for a bald statement to that effect in the later law of status.