The Contract of Employment: A Study in Legal Evolution

This paper reconstructs the evolutionary path of the contract of employmentin English law. It demonstrates that the contract of employment is a more recent innovation than widely thought, and that its essential features owe as much to legislation as they do to the common law of contract. The master-servant model of the nineteenth century was only displaced by the modern contract of employment as a result of twentieth century social legislation and collective bargaining. The paper discusses present-day mutations in the legal form of employment in the light of this analysis.