Brown v. Vogt

I would reverse our earlier decisions and hold that the tort of criminal conversation is judicially abolished. The probable basis of the tort “lay in the proprietary interest of the husband in the body and services of his wife.” Lippman, The Breakdown of Consortium, 30 Colum L Rev 651, 658 (1930). The old English courts created the tort of criminal conversation at a time when a wife was regarded as a servant or a chattel of her husband. That kind of relationship disappeared long before the women’s liberation movement commenced and the tort should have vanished with it.

*488I find nothing in the…