He pledged that private law had only one object, namely the right of things (res).81 Obligations and rights were to be divided into two categories. They could either originate from “somebody’s status, such as married couples’, parents’ and children’s obligations towards each other,” or from certain acts, which involved certain obligations.These acts in turn were either prohibited or permitted.The first category of permitted acts contained contracts.The second one contained the kind of acts that, according to the law of nature, lead to certain consequences, such as that a person who derived advantage from something should pay for it. In 1959 Folke Schmidt stated that the emergence of modern contractual thinking did not occur until 1878, when Winroth published his book about the master-servant relationship. Before that, the most common opinion among Swedish scholars had been to treat the master-servant relationship as a branch of family law.What support do we find for Schmidt’s thesis when studying Nehrman’s book, which was published more than a century before Winroth made his debut? Nehrman made things plain: The origin of the servant’s farreaching obligation to work did not derive from notions of personal status. On the contrary, this obligation was founded on the servant’s free consent to conclude an agreement with a master about the hiring of a service (Sw. tjänstelega).This requirement of consent for putting a duty to work upon a person was founded on “the law of Nature itself ”.82 Although Nehrman may have tried to reject the primacy of Roman law, he readily relied on its terms and concepts as instruments for analysing the Swedish “natural” law. He wrote that the transfer of the utilisation of property in exchange for a fixed salary was called hiring or locatio.83 Moreover, 150 years before p a r t 1 i , c h a p t e r 2 50 81 “men jag understår mig likwäl, at sättia et Jurisprudentiae Civilis objectum allenast neml. Res.” Nehrman 1729, p. 25 (§ 75). 82 “grundar sig på sielfwa Naturens Lag”, Nehrman 1746, p. 73. See also Nehrman 1729, pp. 239 (§ 3), 242 (§ 11). 83 Nehrman 1729, pp. 171-172 (Chapter 1, § 60).
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