Martin v. Massachusetts

Martin v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1 Mass. Reports 348) was an 1805 legal case decided by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, presided over by Francis Dana. It was influential in setting a legal precedent that US married women did not have separate formal political citizenship from their husbands.

Facts of the Case

James Martin was the son of William Martin and Anna Gordon Martin, Loyalists who had fled Massachusetts during the political turmoil of the American Revolution. Anna Gordon Martin had brought significant amounts of real estate into her marriage; through a complicated set of legal arrangements, her husband William had only a life interest in the property. Because the Martins, like other Loyalists, had fled Massachusetts, the post-revolutionary government of Massachusetts had confiscated Anna Gordon Martin's land as state property.

James Martin, as the couple's adult son, argued that his mother had been required to choose between following her husband (as the marital law of coverture required) or staying in Massachusetts (and keeping her land). He argued that his mother had not meant to forfeit her land and that he should be able to claim it back from the state.

Legal Issues

The main issue in this case was whether Anna Gordon Martin had, during her life, possessed the legal ability to choose whether to stay in Massachusetts. Could she, as a married woman, make her own choices about remaining a British citizen or declaring loyalty to the revolutionary government of Massachusetts? Did the law of coverture, which stated that a married man and his wife were the same legal person, mean that women could not be held legally responsible for their own choices?

Impact

Martin v. Massachusetts established the principle in US law that a married woman's citizenship followed that of her husband. Until the passage of the Cable Act in 1922, American citizen women who married noncitizens automatically lost their US citizenship.

References

Candice Lewis Bredbenner (1998). A nationality of her own. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520206509. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL674572M/A_nationality_of_her_own. 

Cott, Nancy F. (2002). Public Vows. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674008755. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7670760M/Public_Vows. 

Kerber, Linda (April 1992). "The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805". American Historical Review 97 (2): 349–378. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2165723.