Agency Reasoning - A Formula or a Tool?

Holmes expressed doubts about the viability of Agency as a subject. This paper suggests that the law of Agency has a valid central core providing for the external powers of agents and their internal relations with their principals, surrounded by a considerable number of areas where agency principles are applied, but incompletely. There is a progression from the more central cases to situations where the agency analogy is weak or even sometimes misleading. In these extended applications it can be said that agency reasoning is only a tool requiring to be used with caution or even not used at all: but when the tool is acceptably used, features of the core of agency reasoning are still recognisably present.