Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Thomas Pierson

Public servants are not ordinary employees. Their relationship to the modern state is special. According to prevailing opinion, this special relation influences rights and duties in the public employment relationship. On an analytical level, it is interesting to see what answers the questions about legal asymmetries and interdependencies reveal about this problem, and conversely, whether the object of investigation can broaden and change the perspectives of the questions associated with the concept. For this purpose, we will attempt a stroll through the history of civil service in the context of state-building, which will examine the particular problems of different epochs more closely. The lecture will show that the narrative of a development from unfree labour to free wage labour can also be refuted in the European context, at least for the public service sector.