2. The distinction between personal and proprietary rights has its counterpart in that between personal and proprietary duties and liabilities. The latter are those which relate to a person’s estate, and diminish the value of it. They represent a loss of money, just as a proprietary right represents the acquisition of it. All others are personal. A liability to be sued for a debt is proprietary, but a liability to be prosecuted for a crime is personal. The duty of fulfilling a contract for the purchase of goods is proprietary, but the duty of fulfilling a contract to marry is personal.

3. Although the term estate includes only rights (in the generic sense), the term status includes not only rights, but also duties, liabilities, and disabilities. A minor’s contractual disabilities are part of his status, though a man’s debts are not part of his estate. Status is the sum of one’s personal duties, liabilities, and disabilities, as well as of one’s personal rights.

4. A person’s status is made up of smaller groups of personal rights, duties, liabilities, and disabilities, and each of these constituent groups is itself called a status. Thus the same person may have at the same time the status of a free man, of a citizen, of a husband, of a father, and so on. So we speak of the status of a wife, meaning all the personal benefits and burdens of which marriage is the legal source and title in a woman. In the same way we speak of the status of an alien, a lunatic, or an infant.

5. It may be thought that proprietary rights should be defined as those which are transferable, rather than as those which are valuable. As to this, it seems clear that all transferable rights are also proprietary; for if they can be transferred, they can be sold, and are therefore worth money. But it is not equally true that all proprietary rights are transferable. Popular speech does not, and legal theory need not, deny the name of property to a valuable right, merely because it is not transferable. A pension may be inalienable; but it must be counted, for all that, as wealth or property. Debts were originally incapable of assignment; but even then they were elements of the creditor’s estate. A married woman may be unable to alienate her estate; but it is an estate none the less. The true test of a proprietary right is not whether it can be alienated, but whether it is equivalent to money; and it may be equivalent to money, though it cannot be sold for a price. A right to receive money or something which can itself be turned into money, is a proprietary right, and is to be reckoned in the possessor’s estate, even though inalienable.

6. It is an unfortunate circumstance that the term status is used in a considerable variety of different senses. Of these we may distinguish the following:

(a) Legal condition of any kind, whether personal or proprietary. This is the most comprehensive use of the term. A man’s status in this sense includes his whole position in the law—the sum total of his legal rights, duties, liabilities, or other legal relations, whether proprietary or personal, or any particular group of them separately considered. Thus we may speak of the status of a landowner, of a trustee, of an executor, of a solicitor, and so on. It is much more common, however, to confine the term in question to some particular description of legal condition—some particular kind of status in this wide sense. Hence the other and specific meanings of the term.

(b) Personal legal condition; that is to say, a man’s legal condition, only so far as his personal rights and burdens are concerned, to the exclusion of his proprietary relations. It is in this sense that we have hitherto used the term. Thus we speak of the status of an infant, of a married woman, of a father, of a public official, or of a citizen; but not of a landowner or of a trustee.

(c) Personal capacities and incapacities, as opposed to the other elements of personal status. By certain writers the term status is applied not to the whole sphere of personal condition, but only to one part of it, namely that which relates to personal capacity and incapacity.[[197]] The law of status in this sense would include the rules as to the contractual capacities and incapacities of married women, but not the personal rights and duties existing between her and her husband. So it would include the law as to infant’s contracts, but not the law as to the mutual rights of parent and child. This law of status in the sense of personal capacity is considered as a special branch of the law, introductory to the main body of legal doctrine, on the ground that a knowledge of the different capacities of different classes of persons to acquire rights and to enter into legal relations is pre-supposed in the exposition of those rights and legal relations themselves. It cannot be doubted that there are certain rules which so permeate the law, that it is necessary in any well-arranged system to dispose of them once for all in a preliminary portion of the code, instead of constantly repeating them in connexion with every department of the law in which they are relevant; but it may be doubted whether the rules of personal capacity belong to this category. Surely the contractual capacity of a minor is best dealt with in the law of contracts, his capacity to commit a tort in the law of tort, his capacity to commit a crime in the criminal law, his capacity to marry in the law of marriage. Moreover, even if personal capacity is a suitable subject for separate and introductory treatment in the law, there seems little justification for confining the term status to this particular branch of personal condition.

(d) Compulsory as opposed to conventional personal condition. Status is used by some writers to signify a man’s personal legal condition, so far only as it is imposed upon him by the law without his own consent, as opposed to the condition which he has acquired for himself by agreement. The position of a slave is a matter of status, the position of a free servant is a matter of contract. Marriage creates a status in this sense, for although it is entered into by way of consent, it cannot be dissolved in that way, and the legal condition created by it is determined by the law, and cannot be modified by the agreement of the parties. A business partnership, on the other hand, pertains to the law of contract, and not to that of status.[[198]]

7. The law of persons and the law of things. Certain of the Roman lawyers, for example Gaius, divided the whole of the substantive law into two parts, which they distinguished as jus quod ad personas pertinet and jus quod ad res pertinet, terms which are commonly translated as the law of persons and the law of things. There has been much discussion as to the precise significance of this distinction, and it is possible that it was based on no clear and consistent logical analysis at all. Any adequate investigation of the matter would here be out of place, but it is suggested that the true basis of the division is the distinction between personal and proprietary rights, between status and property. The jus quod ad res pertinet is the law of property, the law of proprietary rights; the jus quod ad personas pertinet is the law of status, the law of personal rights, so far as such rights require separate consideration, instead of being dealt with in connexion with those portions of the law of property to which they are immediately related.[[199]]