Status

The status of an individual, used as a legal term, means the legal position of the individual in or with regard to, the rest of the community.

L. R. 4 P. D. 11.

The rights, duties, capacities and incapacities which determine a person to a given class, constitute his status; Campb. Austin 137. It also means estate, because it signifies the condition or circumstances in which one stands with regard to his property. In the Year Books, it was used in this sense; 2 Poll. & Maitl. Hist E. L. 11. The movement of progressive society has been from status to contract; Maine, Anc. Law 170. “Maine’s now celebrated dictum as to the movement from status to contract in progressive societies is perhaps to be understood as limited to the law of property, taking that term in its widest sense as inclusive of whatever has a value measurable In exchange. With that limitation the statement is certainly just, and has not ceased to be significant.... As regards the actual definition of different personal conditions, and the more personal relations Incidental to them, it does not seem that a movement from status to contract can be asserted with any generality.... Status may yield ground to contract, but cannot itself be reduced to contract. On the other hand, contract has made attacks on property which have been repulsed. There was a time in the thirteenth century In which it seemed as if there was no rule of tenure that could not be modified by the agreement of parties. Our settled rules that only certain defined forms of interest in property can be created by private acts, our rule against perpetuities, are the answer of the common law to attempts to bring everything under private bargain and control. Maine guarded his position, however, to a considerable extent in the final words of this chapter, for he seems not to include marriage— -at all events marriage among Western nations, which is preceded by and results from agreement of the parties — under the head of status. And, if the term is thus restricted, the gravest apparent exception to Maine’s dictum is removed. This, of course, Involves a sensible narrowing of the term ‘status,’ a much discussed term which, according to the best modern expositions, includes the sum total of a man’s personal rights and duties (Salmond, Jurisprudence 253-257), or, to be verbally accurate, of his capacity for rights and duties (Holland, Jurisprudence 88). It is curious that the word ‘estate,’ which is nothing but the French form of ‘status,’ should have come to stand over against it in an almost opposite category. A man’s estate Is his measurable property; what we call his status is his position as a lawful man, a voter, and so forth. The liability of every citizen to pay rates and taxes is a matter of status; what a given citizen has to pay depends on his estate, or portions of it assigned as the measures of particular imposts. We have, too, an ‘estate’ in land, which so far preserves the original associations of ‘status’ that, as we have just noted, contract may not alter its Incidents or nature.”

Pollock’s Maine’s Anc. Law 184.

As to Mr. Dicey’s suggestion (Law and come a matter, not of contract, but of status,” Sir F. Pollock points out In the same note to Maine, at page 185, that many other kinds of contracts have long had incidents attached to them by law. The action of assumpsit must be reckoned a technical instrument which gave no small help to the forces which were making for the transition from status to contract; 3 Iloldsw. Hist E. L. 349.