THE TIES THAT BIND.

The aim of this essay is to chart the emergence and assess implications of the law's conflation during the first half of the 19th century of the language of employment and the language of service in one doctrinal discourse. During this period, courts in Massachusetts, like courts elsewhere in the Anglo-American common law world, adopted master/servant reasoning as a paradigmatic response to contemporary social and economic changes transforming employment from a highly varied social relation encompassing many different species of interpersonal transactions into the much more uniform and impersonal institution of wage labor. The result was the contract of employment, a doctrinal innovation which combined the contradictory features of a transaction between juridical equals and the exercise of power by a legally-denominated superior over a subordinate. American labor historians have generally confined their interest in 19th century legal history to the impact of the conspiracy doctrine on workers' collective behavior, and have not paid much heed to contemporaneous changes in employment law.