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Agency In State Agencies, Anya Bernstein

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 5 in Distributed Agency, N. J. Enfield & Paul Kockelman, eds.

The democratic state is an administrative state: the actual work of representative governance is done primarily in administrative agencies, which interpret and implement the often vague ambitions inscribed in statutes. When we talk about agency in the state, then, we must primarily be talking about agency in agencies. That may seem odd. Bureaucracy seems like the absence of agency: just mechanistic gear-grinding continuing things begun by other, distant, powerful actors. Where can agency find a foothold amid the faceless people, the featureless buildings, the infinite red …

Cases On Principal And Agent And Master And Servant Selected From Decisions Of English And American Courts, Edwin C. Goddard

Books

“In the first edition of this work no effort was made to cover the subject of Master and Servant. The exigencies of the law school curriculum, if not the unity of the subjects, seem to require that Principal and Agent and Master and Servant be treated in a single course. Historically the subject of Agency grew out of the much earlier developed subject of Master and Servant. Blackstone did not use the term ‘agent’ in reference to the agency relation, nor does he recognize the subject of Agency apart from that of Master and Servant, and there only in a …

Cases On Principal And Agent, Selected From Decisions Of English And American Courts, Edwin C. Goddard

Books

It is a striking proof of the fact that Agency is a modern subject in the law that Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, does not mention the subject by name, and barely makes a four-line reference to one sort of agent in his classification of servants. The old ca~es do, of course, sometimes deal with pure agency questions, but the agent is usually referred to as a servant or a factor, and the questions in issue are generally settled upon some principle of the law of Master and Servant. Agency is essentially a business- relation; hence …