Abstract:
This paper reconstructs the evolutionary path of the contract of
employment in English law. It demonstrates that the contract of
employment is a more recent innovation than is 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.
