STATUS. The status of an individual, used as a legal term, means the legal posi tion of the individual in or with regard to the rest of the community. L. R. 4 P. D. 11. The rights, duties, capacities and incapaci ties whibh 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 bhe move ment 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 in clusive of whatever has a value measurable in ex change. With that limitation the statement is cer tainly 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 mar riage—at all events marriage among Western na tions, which is preceded by and results from agree ment 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 sensibls 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, Juris prudence 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 al most 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 origi nal associations of 'status' that, as we have just noted, contract may not alter its incidents or na ture." Pollock's Maine's Anc. Law 184.
As to Mr. Dicey's suggestion (Law and Public Opinion 283) that "the rights of work men to compensation for accidents have be come a matter, not of contract, but of sta tus," 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 I-loldsw. Hist. E. L. 349.