c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 121 into this extended area of application.Winroth asserted that to the modern service contract should be applied those rules concerning the traditional master-servant relationship that possessed an “essential or natural quality, which was derived from the very character of the contract”. From these natural components Winroth distinguished the traits which for historically explainable reasons had acquired a positively peculiar configuration. This creative arguing that Winroth presented in 1878 was not new at all. It was an adoption of what Friedrich Carl von Savigny, among others, had preached in the 1840s. Some parts of positive law, Savigny asserted at that time, did not have the same value as the others.While some rules could be considered as temporary, positive, or “historical” and without inner value, others represented the “natural”, genuine and necessary core of the law and thus should be preserved. However, Savigny, and later Schrevelius, had used this metaphysical trick to characterise certain labour relationships as matters of family law and thus determined by “Urrechten”.Winroth transplanted it to a contractual context and used it to extract implicit and “natural” terms from the very character of a contract of employment. Foremost of all among these natural terms, the worker’s far-reaching and openended duties to obedience and loyalty made their appearance. At the end of the day,Winroth reached the same conclusion as his old-fashioned predecessors, namely that the quality of the labour relationship was of a “predominantly ethical nature”. Thus,Winroth’s modern contractual thinking did not totally break with the old way of analysing labour relationships. On the contrary, behind a smokescreen of hidden terms,Winroth embraced Savigny, Schrevelius and even older natural law thinkers. It is true that the matter whether a master-servant relationship belonged to public law, family law or the law of obligations, may appear as primarily a question of nomenclature, and of drawing boundaries between different jurisprudentially claimed preserves. Likewise, one can ask if it really did matter whether professors
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