Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Simon Sun, ‘Sticks and Stones: A Three-Pronged Approach to Redressing Racial Discrimination through Tort Law’
INTRODUCTION Ireland’s equality laws are primarily imposed by the Equal Status Acts (ESA) and the Employment Equality Acts (EEA), which despite being heralded as progressive two decades ago, have since faltered in a pandemic that has exacerbated many of the inequalities in Irish society. In particular, the legislation fails to address intersectional discrimination by requiring […]
Sanjukta Paul, ‘Labor Law, Ownership and the Firm’
ABSTRACT Labor law has its own working theory of the business firm – not derivable from another area of law – which is more explicit than other areas of law in positing a basic hierarchy of intrafirm governance, which the affirmative provisions of labor law are then taken to (partially) modify. This is true across […]
Nancy Knauer, ‘Property and the LGBTQ Community: The US Example’
ABSTRACT In the United States, the LGBTQ rights movement has long fought for visibility, recognition, and the type of dignity that comes from living an authentic life. Advocates have advanced these goals by appealing to widely shared norms of equality and liberty, but many of these claims actually involve property rights. They challenge who is […]
Meredith Miller, ‘(In)Coherence in Employment Contract Law: Response to Professors Arnow-Richman and JH Verkerke’
INTRODUCTION In Deconstructing Employment Contract Law, Professors Rachel Arnow-Richman and JH Verkerke present a rigorously logical and perfectly compelling case that the application of unilateral contract theory to employment agreements ‘makes no sense’ and is ‘an antiquated, ill-fitting, incoherent mess’. Unlike a reward, which is the paradigmatic (and perhaps only real example of) a unilateral […]
Sanjukta Paul, ‘Labor Law, Ownership and the Firm’
ABSTRACT Labor law has its own working theory of the business firm – not derivable from another area of law – which is more explicit than other areas of law in positing a basic hierarchy of intrafirm governance, which the affirmative provisions of labor law are then taken to (partially) modify. This is true across […]
De Stefano and Countouris, ‘Lifting the Private-Law Veil: Employer Authority and the Contractual-Coating of Worker Subordination’
ABSTRACT Despite the notion of subordination in work relations and the subjection of workers to the managerial prerogatives of employers have received significant consideration and discourse since the outset of labour law, critical examinations of the underlying foundations of such subordination and subjection in contemporary democracies founded on the rule of law remain scarce. This […]
Barnes, Hevron and Menounou, ‘Tort tales and total justice: Exploring attitudes toward everyday tort claims for workplace injuries’
ABSTRACT Despite some retrenchment, the litigation state remains alive and well. All this litigation has engendered intense debates over whether increased lawsuits represent a rising tide of justice or a flood of frivolous claims. Tort law has been at the center of these debates for decades, standing at the fault line between ‘tort tale’, ‘total […]
Douglas Brodie, ‘Disavowing an Implied Term of Fairness’
ABSTRACT In the Court of Appeal decision in Burn v Alder Hey (Burn), there are obiter suggestions that the employment contract contains an implied term that would require the employer to act fairly during a disciplinary process. In a recent article in this journal, Collins and Golding (the authors) endorse this direction of travel and […]
Pascal McDougall, ‘Global Value Chains, Labor Rights, and the Nature of Transnational Law’
ABSTRACT This Article develops a framework to analyze the laws that bear on working conditions in global value chains (GVCs), a production structure based on hierarchical international firm networks. In so doing, it contributes to broader debates about how to conceptualize law under contemporary ‘globalization’. The Article argues against the widespread view that GVCs – […]
Carabellese and Giustina, ‘The Uber case and gig-individuals against the backdrop of the gig-economy: Dilemmas between labour law and techno-law’
ABSTRACT The ‘Uber workers’ and, more in general, individuals deployed in the platforms, overall considered the ‘gig economy’, have already been the subject matter of multifarious dicta in Italy. However, not only are these court decisions contradictory with each other, but also they are quite nebulous in their underpinning reasoning. Furthermore, there are a few […]