Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Molinari, Giacalone and Ferraris, ‘Relational Access-to-Justice, Smarter Remedies: AI-Supported Resolution in Labour and Family Disputes’
ABSTRACT This article examines how AI-supported tools may improve access to justice in labour and family cases, understood as relational access-to-justice disputes. Rather than treating AI as a substitute for judicial decision-making or expert legal assessment, the paper conceptualises it as an accountable guidance mechanism that helps parties understand procedural options, costs, timeframes, safeguards, and […]
Carter, Shank and Wynter, ‘Do Female Directors Face Larger Career Consequences After Financial Distress?’
ABSTRACT High-visibility labor markets predict larger career penalties for women after negative performance shocks. We test this among bank directors using the 2007-2009 financial crisis and post-crisis failures from 2012-2019, comparing female and male co-directors of the same distressed bank. Difference-in-differences and triple-difference estimates find no gender-asymmetric decline in appointments, appointment quality, committee assignments, or […]
Julian Jonker, ‘Stability in Contract’
ABSTRACT Contract law involves the public and therefore coercive enforcement of private claims. The coercive nature of contract consists in the fact that contract enforcement goes beyond acknowledgement that the underlying claims are binding. This coercive element stands in need of justification. This Article develops a justificatory criterion of reflexive adequacy: contract law doctrine that […]
Eugenia Caracciolo di Torella, ‘Working Parents and the Employment Rights Act 2025: Surely a Question of Care?’
ABSTRACT This article examines the contribution of the Employment Rights Act 2025 to the framework of family-friendly employment rights in the UK. Introduced as part of Labour’s commitment to deliver ‘the biggest upgrade to rights at work for a generation’, the Act aims to strengthen support for working families and improve work–life balance. Whilst the […]
Joe Atkinson, ‘Assessing the Employment Rights Act 2025’
INTRODUCTION The Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA or ‘the Act’), passed in December 2025, has repeatedly been declared the ‘biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation’. It might well be noted that this is not a particularly demanding standard to live up to after 14 years of attacks on labour rights under Conservative-led coalition […]
Rebecca Nocella, ‘Holding onto status: why the Employment Rights Act 2025 leaves digital workers behind’
INTRODUCTION In a society where technology mediates nearly every aspect of daily life – from banking and paying bills to maintaining personal connections – the gig or platform economy has emerged as a seemingly convenient opportunity. Its promise of flexible, on-demand work, often at the click of a mouse, has proven to be particularly appealing […]
Carter, Deakin, McCormack and Pourkermani, ‘On the Economic Consequences (and Causes) of Labour Laws: Estimating the Impact of the Employment Rights Act 2025’
ABSTRACT This article examines the legal and economic effects of the Employment Rights Act 2025. It applies the Cambridge Centre for Business Research Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI), together with newly developed subindices, to measure the Act’s effect on the strength of labour law protections in the UK, and to benchmark those changes against OECD countries. […]
Charlotte Alexander, ‘Rethinking the Litigation Boom’
ABSTRACT This Article rethinks the functions and functioning of litigation booms. Using an original data set that tracks Fair Labor Standards Acts cases during the 2000-2016 period, the Article shows that booms are not anomalies but are instead an expected behavior in our distributed system of civil law enforcement. Specifically, plaintiffs and their lawyers ‘herd’ […]
Sabine Tsuruda, ‘Workplace Authority and the Duty to Bargain’
ABSTRACT Collective bargaining law has a neglected but morally essential role to play in employment. Each person possesses fundamental and equal moral authority over what to do with their bodies, how to think, and what kind of projects and life to pursue, and that authority is directly implicated by employment. Collective bargaining law has the […]
Harris and Kaufman, ‘Consumer Law Meets the New Company Store’
ABSTRACT Firms have discovered new ways to extract value from workers beyond traditional labor exploitation. In labor markets increasingly characterized by monopsony power, platform work, and financialization, employers push a variety of financial products onto workers and establish surveillance systems that monetize worker data. This Article introduces the Triple Extraction Model to explain how firms […]