Opinion ID: 1166838
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: students, like medieval apprentices, stand in the same common-law status to the master as servants

Text: ¶ 7 The apprentice-master bond, a common-law variant of a master-servant relation, is an ancient institution of Anglo-American law which is far from alien to the Oklahoma legal system. My search of the case law yields no Oklahoma authority in which either the ancient form of apprenticeship or its modern counterpart ever received judicial exposition. The institution, which is firmly embedded in our statutory law, was given recognition in Hillcrest v. State Industrial Court. [2] There the court held it inapplicable because the injured student-nurse  a compensation claimant  was found not to occupy any status vis-á-vis the person against whom she pressed her claim. ¶ 8 One who, as a student, is rendering services to a teaching institution for the latter's pecuniary gain, occupies in law the status likened to that of an apprentice. In modern law, an apprentice is one who, while in the course and for the purpose of learning a trade, provides labor to the master, for the latter's pecuniary gain, in return for some advantage which may be other than regular wages. [3] The defendants' consensual deployment of Weldon's labor amounted in law to a mutual assumption of a master-apprentice bond. ¶ 9 The master-servant bond is a mixed notion of contract and status: contract because it is generally consensual; but also status because in some instances it may be imposed not as the result of an intentional private act but involuntarily as a legal consequence attached by the rule of law to the conduct and interaction of the parties. [4] Employment status, a mixed notion of contract and status, is determinable from all the facts and circumstances in evidence. [5] While an agreement between . . . [the parties] would give rise to the relationship and might establish certain of its terms, it is custom and public policy  not the will of the parties  which defines the implicit framework of mutual rights and obligations [in the context of an employer/employee bond]. [6]