Definition
"And servant" is not a standalone legal term. It functions as the second half of the compound legal phrase MASTER AND SERVANT, which historically described the legal relationship between an employer and an employee. The full phrase denominates a body of common law governing the duties, liabilities, and rights arising between one who directs work (the master) and one who performs it under that direction (the servant).
As a relational dyad, "and servant" signals the subordinate party in the relationship: the individual whose labor is engaged, who acts under the control and direction of the master, and whose wrongful acts committed within the scope of employment may be attributed to the master through the doctrine of respondeat superior. The servant's defining characteristic in classical common law was not merely performing work for another, but being subject to the master's control over the manner and means of performing that work — the control test that distinguishes a servant from an independent contractor.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Servant" — a person who performs duties for others, especially a person employed in a house on domestic duties or as a personal attendant.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Servant" — one who serves; a person who is employed by another for menial offices, or for other labor, and is subject to his command; one in a state of subjection or bondage.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but consequential: common usage emphasizes domestic service and physical labor, and connotes social subordination. The legal category of "servant" is broader and more technical. It encompasses factory workers, clerks, and professionals, provided the control test is satisfied. A surgeon employed by a hospital and a janitor employed by the same institution may both be "servants" in the legal sense, while a highly deferential household employee might be an independent contractor if the household owner controls only the result, not the method.
Common Confusion
"Servant" (in the master-servant sense) is frequently conflated with "independent contractor." The distinction carries substantial consequence: a master is vicariously liable for torts committed by a servant within the scope of employment, but generally not for torts committed by an independent contractor. The dividing line — degree of control over the manner of performance — is the same test applied in modern employment law to distinguish employees from contractors, though modern statutory definitions may diverge from the common law formulation. Researchers should not assume that a finding of "servant" status under common law doctrine maps cleanly onto "employee" status under any particular modern statute.
Why It Matters in Research
"And servant" as a research string most often appears in historical sources as part of the master-and-servant heading. Researchers using Law Mind corpus sources should be aware of several navigational points.
First, the phrase "master and servant" was the universal organizing rubric for employment law in American and English legal literature through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bouvier's and similar dictionaries, as well as early digests and treatises, index what we would today call employment, agency, respondeat superior, and labor relations under this heading. Modern researchers searching for employment law doctrine in historical sources who do not also search "master and servant" will miss large bodies of relevant material.
Second, the phrase has been systematically replaced. By the mid-twentieth century, "employer and employee" became the dominant usage in statutes and commentary, and the master-servant terminology retreated to Restatement usage and historical treatises. The Restatement (Second) of Agency retained "servant" as a term of art. The Restatement (Third) of Employment Law and the Restatement (Third) of Agency largely abandoned it in favor of "employee." This terminological shift does not mark a change in the underlying doctrine of vicarious liability so much as a change in vocabulary — but it creates a gap in keyword searching across historical and modern sources.
Third, the control test embedded in the master-servant relationship is the ancestor of the modern multi-factor tests used in tax law, labor law, and tort law to determine employee status. Historical cases using the master-servant framework are still cited in modern disputes over worker classification and gig-economy employment status. Researchers should treat historical master-servant case law as live authority, not merely background.
Fourth, Bouvier's treatment of the subject reflects the nineteenth-century American context: contract permanence, substantial performance by the employer, and the employee's reciprocal obligations. The fragment in Bouvier's referencing 42 Neb. 531 situates the doctrine in contract enforcement, a dimension distinct from — but intertwined with — the tort liability dimension of respondeat superior.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary does not carry a standalone entry for "and servant" as a discrete term. The source material retrieved under this query draws from adjacent Bouvier's entries touching forfeiture of vessels (under a separate context entirely), employment contracts and substantial performance, and the cross-reference to MASTER, directing the reader to the principal entry. This is instructive: Bouvier's treats "master and servant" as a unified heading, with "and servant" having no independent definitional life.
The cross-reference structure in Bouvier's — "See MASTER" — reflects the standard nineteenth-century digest practice of treating the compound phrase as a single doctrine indexed under its dominant term. Researchers using Bouvier's should go directly to MASTER for the substantive treatment of the relationship, the duties owed, and the liability rules. The employment contract fragment (referencing permanent employment and substantial performance by the employer) illustrates Bouvier's treatment of the contractual strand of master-servant law, distinct from its tort strand.
What historical dictionaries including Bouvier's miss: they do not address the dissolution of master-servant terminology in the twentieth century, the influence of the New Deal labor statutes in reframing the relationship, or the divergence between common law servant status and statutory employee definitions. For those developments, the corpus researcher must move to modern treatises and Restatement sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The master-servant doctrine and its control test were adopted across common law jurisdictions in the United States and England with broad consistency, but statutory modifications — workers' compensation regimes, labor relations acts, tax classification rules — vary significantly by jurisdiction and have substantially overlaid the common law framework. No single modern jurisdiction applies pure common law master-servant doctrine without statutory overlay.