Askew

I. Introduction

Queen Victoria’s reign still had more than 30 years to go when, in 1868, Attorney William Gilbert sketched his operetta Trial by Jury which lampooned lawsuits for breach of promise of marriage. In Gilbert’s story, the defendant was a cad—who loved one young lady today—and another young lady tomorrow. The plaintiff, as one might guess, was one of yesterday’s young ladies. B[ut while she may have been brokenhearted, she was not so despairing as to ignore the opportunity to profit on her distress. “Blessing— what love and caressing” rhymed with “assessing”—as in damages—in her plea for a large jury award against the monster defendant. And even though she told the jury how madly she worshipped and adored her erstwhile suitor, she did not hesitate to run off with the judge at the end.

If there was a serious “legal” point behind Gilbert’s satire of breach of promise cases, it was the potential for abuse inherent in such lawsuits, which, when Gilbert was writing, could still result in the redistribution of a large part of a defendant’s wealth as the result of the breakup of a “relationship” (to use the modem term). This potential was to be well noted by the…