Felix Frankfurter

“ Suffice it to say that we cannot infuse into the conspiracy statute a fictitious attribution to Congress of regard for the medieval notion of woman's submissiveness to the benevolent coercive powers of a husband in order to relieve her of her obligation of obedience to an unqualifiedly expressed Act of Congress by regarding her as a person whose legal personality is merged in that of her husband making the two one. ”

“ The claim that husband and wife are outside the scope of an enactment of Congress in 1948, making it an offense for two persons to conspire, must be given short shrift once we heed the admonition of this Court that 'we free our minds from the notion that criminal statutes must be construed by some artificial and conventional rule,' United States v. ”

“ It is not a medieval mental quirk or an attitude 'unnourished by sense' to believe that husbands and wives should not be subjected to such a risk, or that such a possibility should not be permitted to endanger the confidentiality of the marriage relationship. ”

“ The learning invoked for this ancient doctrine has been questioned by modern scholarship. See Williams, The Legal Unity of Husband and Wife, 10 Mod.L.Rev., 16 (1947) ; and cf. Winfield, The History of Conspiracy (1921) , § 27, p. 64, and § 37, p. 88. But in any event the answer to Hawkins with his Year Book authority, as a basis for a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1960 construing a statute enacted in 1948, was definitively made long ago by Mr. ”