c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 331 man to run an enterprise. Concurrently it preserved the patriarchal Statute of Servants and Hired Labourers of 1833 as the most important labour law to supplement contracts in which the parties had not regulated the terms. Even if theVagrancy Act’s duty of taking annual service was abolished in 1885, the century-old master-servant rules, which prescribed long-lived, personal and diffuse labour relations, were still in force. Politicians, debaters and legal scholars discussed how to legally treat the old master-servant relationship and above all the increasing number of the new “free” labour contracts. Simultaneously legal science became not only more professionalised, but also more specialised. Partly influenced by the German historical school, legal scholars gradually abandoned the previous status doctrine in favour of ideas about personal autonomy that emphasised every individual’s legal competence. This shift was aimed at emphasising a dividing line between state and civil so-ciety, as well as between public law and private law. Of particular significance for labour issues was the muddled distinction between family law and the law of obligations, which both were treated as branches of private law. Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the predominant figure of the German historical school’s older branch, asserted that law developed organically with its roots deep in the people’s “Volksgeist”. Established custom was considered as the most important source of law, which led to an unsympathetic view on legislation. He underlined the distinction between public law and private law, as well as between politics and jurisprudence, and he is regarded to have promoted a move from the older status-based doctrines in favour of every person’s legal competence to handle his own matters. At the same time as Savigny rejected natural law as a source of law, he took a problematic stand. Some parts of positive law, Savigny declared, must be considered as temporary and without an inner value and thus could be changed or abolished. Other
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