For this reason, the correct view is that an invalid profit-sharing investment partnership requires payment of the customary share of profit, not the customary wage. The worker is therefore given the share of profit customarily given to someone like him: one half, one third, or two thirds. As for awarding him a fixed sum for which the owner is liable, as in employment and reward contracts, those who advocate this are mistaken. Their error arises from assuming that this is an employment contract, and so awarding him customary remuneration when it is invalid, just as they award him the stipulated payment when it is valid. What demonstrates the error of this view is that the worker might work for ten years: if he were awarded the customary wage, he would receive several times the original capital. Yet under a valid partnership, he is entitled only to a share of the profit, if there is any profit. How, then, could he be entitled under an invalid partnership to several times what he would receive under a valid one?

Likewise, those who deemed sharecropping and orchard-tending partnerships invalid assumed that they were employment contracts with unknown remuneration, and therefore invalidated them. Some of them upheld those arrangements for which there was a need, such as orchard-tending partnerships involving trees, since trees cannot be leased, whereas land can. They permitted sharecropping when ancillary to orchard-tending, either without further restriction or only when the open land constituted one third. All this rests on the assumption that the evidence requires sharecropping to be invalid, and that it was permitted only because of need.

Anyone who gives the matter due consideration will recognize that sharecropping is farther removed from injustice and gambling than leasing land for a specified rent payable as a binding liability. For the tenant seeks only to benefit from the crop growing on the land. If he becomes liable for the rent, while what he seeks from