The Legal Structure of the Contract of Employment

Abstract This chapter proposes a large and evolving set of structural principles which between them identify the contract and prescribe its functioning. These principles characterize and impart shape and structure to the contract of employment, and the chapter suggests a theory of adjudication which helps to explain how the process of articulation and application of those structural principles takes place. It articulates a set of three central normative principles, exchange, integration, and reciprocity, derived from the processes of legislation and adjudication. The chapter then argues that these three principles work to explain and evaluate an essentially variable and evolutionary structural core of the law of the contract of employment. A concluding section explains how, in the subsequent chapters, this structural core is related to and placed in the context of the larger body of principles and rules which compose the law of the contract of employment.