Reports of Cases in Law and Equity in the Supreme Court of the State of New York Volume 28 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 Excerpt: ... in the life of the wife." (1 Atkyns, 609.) These statutes execute their own purpose. Trustees are dispensed with, and husbands excluded. The machinery is simple, the intent clear. From the influences of such considerations, I held before, and seeing no reason to change those views, I hold now, that our natural progress in knowledge and intelligence, our advanced social and political condition, our changed system of government, our better and more full appreciation of equal and natural rights of every class and condition of citizens, Billings v. Baker. presented a reason, and I thought and still think, a necessity, for the passage of an act for the eradication of this unnatural and worse than useless tenure, called curtesy, as one of the vestiges of a bygone, military age, which had too long remained an excrescence upon our system of law, based as we claim it to he, upon the theory of an equality of natural rights. In my judgment, the provisions of these statutes, of 1848 and 1849, are aptly fitted, and were intended to effect, a radical change in relation to those tenures; that they introduced changes more suited to the necessities of the times, and to the present condition of parties; and that such a change was demanded by the highest considerations of public policy; was dictated by the soundest views of justice, and rested on a substantial basis of good, sense. In my former opinion I took the position that before the passage of these statutes, where it was the evident intent in making a settlement of an estate upon a married woman, that she was to hold it as a feme sole, the husband could not have curtesy; and I cited Hearle v. Greenbarik, (3 Atk. 695, ) to prove that proposition. Upon more examination, I hold that case to be undoubted law. It would ...