English common-law rules that transferred the property of women to their husbands upon marriage were part of the larger package of laws emigrants from England brought to Canada. These harsh rules left Canadian women in a most unenviable position—the equitable precedents that had evolved in England to prevent the most glaring instances of abuse had less impact in Canada where courts of equity developed slowly and sporadically, and many individuals had no practical access to their jurisdiction. The need for reform of married women's property law was made even more pressing because of an apparently high rate of wife abandonment, which left women without the benefit of matrimonial support, yet still subject to the disabilities of coverture.

Before the income-splitting joint tax return for husbands and wives became a part of the Internal Revenue Code in 1948, the federal income tax was assessed essentially on an individual basis. The progressive rate structure of the income tax meant that a husband and wife would, as a couple, pay the least tax if their income were divided equally between them. This became a substantial consideration as maximum marginal rates of tax exceeded 90 percent during the 1940s.

With current procedure under assault, this is a particularly important time to study the procedural rules and thought of David Dudley Field's era. The present espousal of such devices as case management and alternative dispute resolution is both a sign of and a reaction to a procedural regime that is in question and in decline, if not in its death throes. But before embarking on new procedural roads or recommitting ourselves to old paths, we need to reflect upon our procedural ancestry in some detail.

On 16 June 1837, at a little after six o'clock in the morning, a train of cars carrying lumber and gravel and crowded with twenty or more Irish track laborers and other workmen left the Boston depot of the Boston & Worcester Railroad Corporation bound for Worcester. About four miles out, just after the train had passed the City Mills and was nearing the Brookline road, a wheel on one of the cars broke. The train was thrown from the tracks. Two men were killed and several others severely injured.

Among the injured was a man named Gilham Barnes, engaged by the Corporation about two weeks before to carry out maintenance work on several bridges between Boston and Worcester. On the previous day, Barnes, his brother Luther, and one of the men who worked with them had ridden the same train (an unscheduled track maintenance train known to the corporation as the “gravel” train) as far as the Arsenal bridge, which carried the railroad over the Watertown road in Brighton, to deliver materials and tools. On the morning of the sixteenth, Barnes sent the others by wagon via the Mill Dam toll road to begin work on the Arsenal bridge while he made arrangements with the conductor of the gravel train for additional materials to be carried to the Worcester bridge. Barnes intended, it would seem, to ride the gravel train as far as the Arsenal bridge where he would jump off and join his workmen. “We saw the train going out just after we paid [the] toll,” Luther Barnes later recounted. “Then near City Mills we saw shingles &c all about. I saw my brother running towards us. He waved his hat twice. And he held up his arm and I saw blood and flesh.”