South Florida Personal Injury Blog

Broward personal injury attorney Andrew Alitowski represents clients in modern day civil suits for their injuries, like swimming pool accidents, nursing home abuse, and slip and fall cases. These civil causes of action, common throughout the south Florida Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area, provide relief to people who have been injured due to someone else’s (usually negligent) behavior. However, Florida law used to recognize some causes of action that now seem antiquated. They are still interesting to discuss. Palm Beach accident lawyer Andrew Alitowski believes they are an interesting study in the evolution of tort law during the twentieth century.

The first cause of action is alienation of affections. It has long been abolished in Florida, although it is still recognized in nine minority-view states. In most cases, a husband or wife sued his or her spouse’s paramour, although other possible defendants included family members or others who encouraged the spouse to divorce, like parents or siblings.

The next outdated cause of action criminal conversation, which is generally synonymous with adultery: a married person has sexual relations outside of the marriage. In some cases, the offense only applied to married women. The husband would have a civil cause of action against the man who had a relationship with his wife.

Seduction has also been formally abolished in the state of Florida. Seduction is enticing a person – usually a woman – to engage in sexual relations. The idea was that the person who was seduced would not have made such a decision on her own, without the seducer’s actions. Often, a woman engaged in sex because she was led to believe the man would marry her. Seduction is largely an outdated criminal charge, but the Florida Statutes also list it as a tort that has been abolished.

Finally, a Floridian may no longer sue for breach of contract to marry. When a man promised a woman that he would marry her, courts until the twentieth century treated the agreement as a binding contract. A man who got cold feet and later refused to marry his fiancée might find himself subject to civil damages – she could sue him.

As ideas of marriage and sexuality have changed, these torts have fallen out of fashion. The changing notions of gender roles and the rise of women’s rights – as well as careers and roles outside the home – also influenced the decline of these torts. Broward personal injury attorney Andrew Alitowski expects the few states that retain some of these causes of action to eventually take them off the books, especially in the wake of constitutional privacy case law.