## Facts

- Elizabeth C. Brown sued her husband, Thomas S. Brown, seeking damages for assault and battery and false imprisonment committed during the marriage.
- The parties married in October 1877.
- The husband asserted that coverture and public policy against disrupting marital peace barred a wife’s tort action against her husband.

## Issues

1. Whether Connecticut’s Married Women’s Act of 1877 eliminated the common-law bar preventing a wife, married after the Act’s effective date, from suing her husband in tort for personal injuries.
2. Whether public policy favoring “domestic tranquility” justified retaining interspousal tort immunity despite the statutory change in married women’s legal status.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Errors reversed the judgment sustaining the husband’s demurrer and remanded for further proceedings.
- The court held that a wife whose marriage occurred after the effective date of the 1877 Act could maintain a tort action against her husband for assault, battery, and false imprisonment.
- The court rejected the claim that coverture still controlled such marriages and declined to deny a civil remedy based on asserted domestic-tranquility concerns.

## Legal Principles

- At common law, husband and wife were treated as one legal person (the husband), which prevented spouses from suing each other.
- Connecticut’s 1877 Married Women’s Act created a new legal status for persons marrying after its effective date, recognizing married women as separate legal persons with capacity to sue and be sued.
- Where a husband is subject to criminal liability for beating or falsely imprisoning his wife, denying the wife a civil remedy for the same wrongs is inconsistent with the post-Act legal status.
- Public policy concerns about marital harmony do not reestablish interspousal immunity when the statutory framework removes the unity-of-person rationale for coverture.

## Conclusion

Because the Browns married after the 1877 Act took effect, the wife had legal capacity to sue her husband for intentional personal torts, and the trial court erred in dismissing her complaint on coverture grounds.


Brown v. Brown, 88 Conn. 42 (Conn. 1914)