c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 245 Birger Ekeberg (1880-1968) was professor of private law at Stockholm’s University College, a justice of the Supreme Court, a member of the International Court at The Hague, and, with time, also a member of the Swedish Academy. He assumed the position of minister of justice in several governments during the 1920s and, among other measures, introduced the bill that led to the abolition of capital punishment in peace time. In Ekeberg’s notes from his lectures around 1925, it is stated that the often “draconian” rules of the Statute on Hired Servants were in a process of modernisation. Like Wilhelm Chydenius and others, he discussed the need for regulation of the currently large number of service contracts that did not come under the master-servant relationship.What distinguished the contract from the master-servant agreement was that the work effort was more closely defined and that the parties were not in the same relationship of superior and inferior party. As opposed toWinroth, Nordling, Björling and others, Ekeberg did not openly discuss what rules from the Statute on Hired Servants could be analogously applied to the free service contract, but instead seems to have wanted to deal with the contract as a new and independent category within private law. In his analysis of the parties’ obligations, he commenced his analysis with the use of the relatively new terms,“employer” (Sw. arbetsgivare) and “employee” (arbetstagare). However, already after three lines, he relapsed into talking about “the master” (husbonden) and “the servant” (tjänaren) respectively. Further evidence of the confusion of concepts at this time was the fact that Ekeberg used the terms “employer” and “employee” even for the parties to a contract on piecework.498 Ekeberg was brief when it came to the contents of the obligations. The worker was to report for work at the time agreed 498 Ekeberg 1925, pp. 242-243, 253-256. Ekeberg
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