The Crown, Her Majesty's Government, and the Commonwealth

The talk will explore the concept concept of office in public law, and the way that personality and corporation have been received and continue to function in the modern bureaucratic state
apparatus even if we tend to think in an employment paradigm. By reference to the concept of 'status function' drawn from Searleian social ontology, I argue that we should refurbish the concept of office and put it back to work as an analytic category in public law. I relate the separate capacity in which an official acts qua official to the logic of action and the
logic of deontic relations using a revised version of the Hohfeldian scheme.