Where does principal collide?

In criminal law a principal is the party who actually carries out an offence, set apart from an accessory who only aids, counsels, or abets it. William Blackstone's 1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Book the Fourth) laid out the degrees, dividing offenders into principals in the first degree, who commit the act, principals in the second degree, who are present and assist, and accessories before or after the fact. Here the word marks primacy in a wrongful act and fixes who bears the fullest responsibility. This referent is a role in the commission of a crime, not a quantity of money, a reference plane in a lens, or the party who hires an agent.[6][1]

Unit

One offender's degree of participation in a specific criminal act

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established at trial by evidence of who performed the act and who merely assisted, fixing each participant's degree

In optics the principal planes and principal points are cardinal reference elements of a lens or mirror system, the pair of conjugate planes at which the system behaves as if all of its bending of light took place, and from which object and image distances are measured. Carl Friedrich Gauss's 1841 Dioptrische Untersuchungen introduced the reduction of a complex optical system to a few such cardinal elements, the framework now called Gaussian optics, later developed in works such as Born and Wolf's Principles of Optics. A principal ray is a related defined reference ray traced through the system. This referent is a geometric reference surface in an imaging system, not a sum of money, the primary actor in a crime, or the party who hires an agent.[2][3]

Unit

A reference plane located by its position along the optical axis

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Located by ray tracing or by measuring the system's cardinal points and focal lengths

In agency theory the principal is the party who engages another, the agent, to act on the principal's behalf, and who bears the consequences when the agent's interests diverge from the principal's. Stephen Ross's 1973 The economic theory of agency: The principal's problem named the problem of designing incentives for an agent under this delegation, and Jensen and Meckling's 1976 Theory of the firm built the agency-cost account of the firm around the relationship between principals such as shareholders and agents such as managers. This referent is a role in a relationship of delegated authority, not a quantity of money, a reference plane in a lens, or the primary actor in a crime.[4][5]

Unit

A party in a delegated relationship, identified by whose interests the agent is meant to serve

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through contracts and incentive structures, and empirically through the agency costs borne by the principal